“Melodies and Maladies: Musical Responses to Plagues and Pandemics”

Call for Chapters
Editors Dr. Brent Keogh and Prof. Phil Hayward

Equinox Publishing

Chapter proposals are invited for a collected edition on the theme of musical responses to plagues and pandemics. This book will chart a historical trajectory of musical responses to plagues and pandemics, providing a critical historical perspective on the lived experiences in the present. By focusing on major plagues, outbreaks, and pandemics, such as the Black Death, the Spanish flu, SARS, and Zika virus, we aim to historically contextualise musical responses to such disasters. In addition to charting historical contexts, this collection will address ways in which musicians have harnessed digital technologies to create forms of patronage, connect with fans, rehearse with band members, and network with peers and industry. The volume will also discuss musical responses in terms of the intersections of class and race, where social distancing is virtually impossible for some classes of people due to their specific living conditions, or where the prevailing Government policy is to “let it rip”, to allow a virus to sweep through the population for reasons of “herd immunity”, economic stability, or an under-resourced medical system. This edition will provide a timely work that not only accounts for the exceptional times we are living in, but sheds light on this time by thinking historically through musical responses to plagues and pandemics and suggesting manners in which future ones may be navigated by cultural producers and audiences.

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The Handbook on Music Business and Creative Industries in Education  

Call for Book Chapter Proposals
Editor: Daniel Walzer, Ph.D.

Creative arts professions remain in a period of flux. As the music industry and related fields adapt to changing business models, student interest in training for a career in the entertainment sector continues to rise. Though the expansion of global degree offerings in the creative industries expands each year, a “state of the field” on educational and pedagogical issues in the music business and the creative industries has yet to be created.

University educators serve a crucial purpose in preparing future graduates for a highly competitive path in the gig economy. The Editor invites proposals from a broad range of scholars and industry professionals working in the creative arts for the compendium, tentatively scheduled for release in early 2022. Discussions are underway with a publisher with details to be completed this summer. Topics might include:

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“Climates of Popular Music”, 21st Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music

The most pressing issue for humanity in the 21st century is global climate, and thus IASPM’s 21st Conference turns its attention towards this subject. Whereas our 20th anniversary conference considered where we have been, we now ask where we are now, what we are doing as a species, and what impact it has on our communities and our world. On a planet increasingly interconnected by a dizzying array of media channels, such a discussion has to be broadly framed. Our planet’s climate is impacted by numerous forms of human activity, including those that are individual, personal, local, communal, institutional, commercial, corporate, cultural, political, and international. This conference invites presentations that ask how popular music relates to our climate, where climate relates to any part of the totality of surrounding conditions and circumstances affecting growth or development. By “climate,” we intend to include a range of definitions, including ecological climate, political climates, socio-political climates, and contextual and individuated climates. We ask presenters to consider the impacts of activities related to popular music and its cultures on variously defined climates, and the impacts of changing or changed climates on different popular music and its contexts.

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The Punk Scholars Network website

The Punk Scholars Network is celebrating 8 years of punk scholarship by launching our brand new Punk Scholars Network website https://www.punkscholarsnetwork.com/

Please go visit the fantastic new website where you  can view all the interesting and insightful work the Punk Scholars Network has been involved in since its inception in 2012, including publications and events as well as our new blog that features announcements about new punk research and other creative work. You can even buy affordable PSN merch direct from the website to help support the not-for-profit Punk Scholars Network.

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Music, Sound and Silence in Videogames

Journal of Sound, Silence, Image and Technology (JoSSIT)
Issue editor: Lidia López Gómez

Number: 3 (December 2020)
Deadline for full articles: 1^st October 2020
Issue date: 22^nd December 2020

The scientific publication the Journal of Sound, Silence, Image and Technology (JoSSIT) grew out of the research group of the same name (SSIT), which is linked to the TecnoCampus university centres, affiliated with Pompeu Fabra University (UPF). The journal seeks to bring together academic debate and scientific research on the relationship between sound as a broad concept and an audiovisual context.

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IASPM UK&I London Calling Conference

IMPORTANT INFO FOR THOSE PLANNING TO ATTEND THE ONLINE CONFERENCE:

1. If you haven’t registered on Eventbrite by 5pm UK time on Monday 18th May (Click Here To Register) we can’t guarantee we can process you in time for the first keynote on Tuesday with Mykaell Riley – although you will still be able to watch it on the website – just not participate in the discussion. You can continue to register after that and we will process people as quickly as we can.
2. On Tuesday morning we will email everyone who has registered with the conference login details. People who register later will be emailed separately.
3. We can only let 100 people into the keynote Zoom sessions but you can also watch the session live on the website and use the comments section to ask questions. (There are nearly 200 people registered at the moment and still rising). Details of the ‘door policy’ for the Zoom session will be announced in the login email on Tuesday morning.
4. Every week there will be some streamed performances after the keynote and, for the most part, they are musicians without other income so please support them by contributing something through the PayPal.Me links under the YouTube Live screens on the website.

The website for the event is here: https://london-calling-iaspm2020.com

Masters scholarship for BAME students at Goldsmiths

Goldsmiths Department of Music offers a MA/MMus scholarship for BAME students.

There is a dramatic under-representation of black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) music scholars at the academic professional level. The same is true throughout British academia. This full tuition fee-waiver scholarship aims to support a BAME student who intends to progress through postgraduate study and into an academic research position.

The deadline for applying for this scholarship is 9am, 13 July 2020.

Full details: https://www.gold.ac.uk/pg/fees-funding/departmental-awards/music/

Born to Be Alive: Live Music as a Crucial Dimension of 21st Century Popular Music

Ethnomusicology Review Special Issue (more info here)

Savage (2019) paints a devastating portrait of the music industry’s current state. In the United States, record sales have dropped about 80% in the last decade: from 450 to 89 million, and its plight continues. From 2017 to 2018, worldwide record sales percentage plummeted an additional 23%. At the latest Grammy Awards, two of the nominees for best album never had a physical release. The situation becomes more acute when analyzing 2018’s top selling records: the vast majority relates to film soundtracks. How can the music industry react? We must first consider that this is a very recent reality and that the actors’ adaptability cannot keep up with the constant technological progress in music digitalization and that, these days, anyone with a computer or smartphone is able to download hundreds of albums and stockpile thousands of songs. We sometimes forget that those processes only started back in 1998 with the evolution of the MP3 player. At the time, the MP3 format allowed a revolutionary audio compression. It was a clear example of an action’s non-intended consequences: a tool which was supposed to help the music industry ended up harming it in the long run. As we know, after MP3 came sharing websites like Napster, KaZaa with peer-to-peer downloads of free music. If, on the one hand, the number of downloads was ever-growing, the music industry’s reaction was to potentially sue any and all people who illegally downloaded a file (Morris, 2015). The most recent example of this phenomenon in everyone’s mind may be Metallica’s quixotic struggle.

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21st Century Music Practice Research Network – Session 2

Seven Practice-Research Online Symposia – Summer 2020

Session 2: Restrictions and Affordances

This is a call for audio or audio-visual work which explores this practice-research theme in some way. The work will be presented online through YouTube and the http://C21MP.org website and additionally promoted through the IASPM UK & Ireland online conference hosted by the University of West London this summer. Discussion of the pieces (and/or practice-based responses) will also be presented through the website. The work can be in any style (from the highly commercial to the highly experimental) and be any combination of vocal, acoustic, electrical and electronic. It has, of course, to illuminate the theme and can include:

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Popular Music and Society Special Issue: Jazz Diasporas

Guest Editors: Bruce Johnson and Adam Havas

Submissions are invited for a special issue of Popular Music and Society on jazz diasporas. This special issue is about how jazz circulated beyond its accepted sites of origin. This can be both international and intranational; that is, jazz outside the United States, but also jazz outside New Orleans. The latter has received extensive coverage in jazz historiography through geographically based stylistic typologies: Chicago, New York, Kansas City, West Coast. While there is also a growing literature on the international diaspora, both are dominated by essentialist metropolitan and national taxonomies. These approaches elide the dynamics of micro-localized scenes, how and why they are formed, what sort of networks they emerge from and develop. So, by way of example, more might be learned about the circulation of jazz by the study of international port cities and shipping routes than by generalisations based on an individual nation, or by the study of sub-urban scenes than under the rubric of a large city. To understand jazz, one must understand its diasporic reinventions.

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