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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Riffs Vol 5 Issue 1: Popular music fiction

“Perhaps only imagination, in its full processes, can touch and reach and recognise and embody… There are many other kinds of writing in society, but these now—of past and present and future—are close and urgent, challenging many of us to try both to understand and to attempt them”
— Raymond Williams

“Good prose is like a windowpane”
— George Orwell

Perhaps you have a comic strip that you wrote on issues of representation in the music industry, or a piece of short fiction that considers popular music heritage, work that has not yet found a home. Or maybe your experiences as a musician, a music fan or researcher have provided you with rich characters, begging to be explored through a dialogue or a short story. We invite you to flex your imagination as a tool for analysis and criticism, to find a fictional form for your insights and arguments, and to imagine potential popular music futures (utopian or dystopian) as a means to critique the present.

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Popular Music and Populism

Special issue of Popular Music (41:4) on Popular Music and Populism (2022)

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/popular-music/popular-music-and-populism-cfp

Populism has been researched from a great array of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences over the last decades. In musicology and popular music studies, however, the concept has been relatively neglected so far. This is all the more surprising since populism and music have been intricately connected at least since the nineteenth-century populist movement in the U.S. (Patch 2016; Kazin 2017), and popular music studies have a long tradition of research into music and politics (Street 2017; Garratt 2019), subcultures and counter-cultural movements that challenge the hegemonic ‘power bloc’ (Clarke et. al. 1975; Hebdige 1979; Eyerman and Jamison 1995). This special issue, therefore, seeks to explore the nexus between popular music and populism.

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‘People Have the Power’: Songs of Resistance in Late Modernity

CITIES, Communities and Territories Special Issue 2021.

Guest Editors: Paula Guerra, University of Porto, Portugal; Elizabeth Turner, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand; Carles Feixa, Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, Spain

The aim of this special issue is to examine the unique force of popular music in response to recent and contemporary social problems, and the changing concepts of resistance and protest in popular music. Taking as an example the Portuguese reality in a context of crisis, when the International Monetary Fund intervened in the country, Guerra (2019) illustrates the importance of such reflection and discussion. The author shows how artistic manifestations – in this case, music and protest songs – are themselves a means and an object of social intervention, demarcating a specific, defined space in the acknowledgement and revelation of social problems, and in the contestation, deconstruction and accusation of problems that deal with social reality. Protest songs instigate readings, narratives and deconstructions of reality, and they are simultaneously significant elements of a collective identity.

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Prosecuting and Policing Rap 

Special issue of Popular Music 40.4 (2021)  

Contributions are invited to a special issue of Popular Music on the complex interface between rap music (taken in its broadest sense to include mainstream rap, gangsta rap, activist rap, drill, grime, etc.) and criminal justice systems around the world.

Rap music is an international youth-cultural powerhouse and, while its spread has been celebrated, it has also been attended by mounting criminalisation. This special issue asks researchers to explore the policing and prosecuting of rap and how this has been framed in media reporting. It also considers what might make rap susceptible to such state criminalisation and how rappers, communities, civil liberties groups, defence lawyers, and scholars have come to challenge ‘prosecuting rap’.

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Musical Regions and Regionalisms in the USA

Song and Popular Culture of the Center for Popular Culture and Music, Vol. 66 (2021), ed. by Julius Greve and Knut Holtsträter

Samuel A. Ward and Katherine Lee Bates’ America the Beautiful summons the Arcadian beauty of the natural and cultural landscape of the USA and the unity of the states from coast to coast is conjured up as fatefully harmonious; a “brotherhood from sea to shining sea”. This basic idea of the American Dream, enveloping both the diversity of regional cultures and the unity of national culture, is expressed in many rural and urban musical cultures throughout the United States. From its inception as a nation, the USA has always been musically constructed as a network of regions that are separated from and related to each other, but at the same time may contribute to a greater whole, a higher cause – E pluribus unum. While the belief in the integrative power of this unity-in-diversity proved to be both meaningful and problematic, this idea seems to be finally crumbling at the beginning of the third decade of the 21st century. The focus of this volume will be on these aspects – not only with regard to the current crisis-ridden situation of US-American society, but also in terms of earlier historical developments of the USA. The yearbook volume for 2021 seeks to shed light on the wide field of musical regions and regionalisms in the USA and asks for corresponding contributions.

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Heavy Metal Music and Dis/Ability: Crips, Crowds, and Cacophony

Heavy Metal Music and Dis/Ability​ seeks authors to join this edited volume of essays.

While many metal scholars have discussed people with disabilities and their lives in/with heavy metal music informally, or as part of panel discussions, little is in publication about music and people with disabilities, let alone metalheads and disability. Studies on disability and popular music exist, but do not include the very corporeal genre that is heavy metal music.

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