Déan é tú féin – DIY Music and Music Culture in Ireland

1 day Symposium
Date: 3^rd April, 2020
Venue: School of Media Technological University Dublin
Submission Deadline: 20^th January 2020

DIY music has a long history of credibility and success on the island of Ireland. From the Dublin punk scenes of the 1980’s and the Cork scene of the 1990’s to the fact the number one selling album of all time in Ireland was the front room produced White Ladder. From peace-work in the context of the Northern Irish Troubles to the sites of recent feminist struggles, DIY artists have often adopted a strong political stance and engaged in meaningful activist work through consciousness raising activities that have contributed to social change on the island of Ireland. DIY music culture in Ireland has exploded in recent years due to the proliferation of new technology and it remains a site for social and sonic experimentation affording diverse and new voices the opportunity to be heard. This symposium aims to bring together disparate voices to explore some of the myriad ways in which DIY culture has impacted Irish popular music.

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Symposium: Music Studies on a Damaged Planet: Sound Responses to Environmental Breakdown

Supported by the Institute of Musical Research (RHUL)
Senate House, London, 27^th March 2020

If, as activist Greta Thunberg says, the only response to climate crisis is to ‘act as if our house is on fire’, where does this leave music studies? Music scholars, like the wider academy and society at large, have struggled to respond to the climate emergency and environmental breakdown. And while nature and the environment have been mounting thematic concerns in some recent work, the scale and complexity of the current ecological crisis and the urgent need for widespread systemic change raise questions about the roles and responsibilities of music scholarship as a whole. If we must now find ways to live on a damaged planet (Tsing, Swanson, Gan and Bubandt 2017), environmental breakdown is no longer simply a topic with which some music scholars choose to engage; rather, it is one of the conditions in which music studies operates.

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Global South Popular Music Perspectives

Date: Friday 28 February, 2020

Presentations from 9am to 5pm at the Garden Building, Bowen Street (above Streat Café), RMIT, with lunch provided, followed by DJ/VJ event at Loop Project Space & Bar featuring symposium participants.

Seeking papers from researchers to be presented on popular music-making and performance from the perspective of the ‘Global South’.  We are also soliciting presentations from musicians, producers, DJs, and sound system operators.

Submit abstracts of 300 words to: [email protected] by 15 January 2020

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Leisure Studies Association Annual Conference 2020: Leisure Pasts, Presents and Futures

Manchester Metropolitan University
7-9 July 2020
Birley Campus

The Leisure Studies Association is delighted to open the first call for abstracts for its annual conference in 2020, including a special stream on music and sound in leisure spaces.

The conference offers the opportunity to explore leisure from a range of disciplinary perspectives, and to learn from industry and policy practitioners.

In 2020, its core theme is leisure pasts, presents and futures. Presenters and delegates are thus invited to consider:

• How has leisure been constructed, understood and enacted over time?
• What role does leisure play in addressing societal challenges today?
• How can the past inform the present in terms of leisure practice, policy and research?
• What are the future trends in policy, practice and research?
• Where and when do we make space for leisure in 2020?

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Call for Chapters for Edited Collection on Psychedelic Music

This edited collection aims to bring together academic work on all kinds of psychedelic music, whether rock, folk, electronic or pop and would make an important contribution to an emerging field. For the purpose of this collection psychedelic music is conceptualized broadly: it can be music that imparts feelings of disorientation, temporal distortion, sensory overload or shift in perceptual frame, similar to those experienced with the use of psychoactive substances; music composed for the specific purpose of facilitating altered states; it can also be any music which accompanies and complements psychoactive substance use, whether widely considered psychedelic, or not.

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Augmentation: past, futures, possibilities and pathways

AJIRN4 2020
Augmentation: past, futures, possibilities and pathways 
University of Tasmania (UTAS)
https://www.ajirn.com

Key Note Speaker: (TBC)

Call for papers and performances:

The 2020 Australasian Jazz and Improvisation Research Network will be convened by the University of Tasmania (UTAS)
https://www.utas.edu.au/the-hedberg

Conference Date: 8th – 10th June 2020

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Music in the Age of Streaming – Nordic Perspectives

IASPM-Norden conference 2020
Music in the Age of Streaming – Nordic Perspectives

PITEÅ, SWEDEN, 15–17 JUNE 2020

The IASPM-Norden conference aims to shed light on various aspects of streaming of/in popular music within the Nordic context. Nordic popular music is a dynamic field comprising a great variety of artists, music producers and entrepreneurs on both ends of the cultural spectrum, from commercially successful to less known and underground. More broadly, listening to popular music has become an evermore accessible activity in people’s everyday life, and so have the “streams” of music flowing across many borders – geographical, ideological, socioeconomic, cultural, disciplinary, etc. In addition to the everyday distribution and listening of music through digital networks, we contend specifically that “streaming” may also be used to conceptualize musical cultures beyond the scope of Spotify or other streaming services. That said, even an analysis of a platform like Spotify may benefit from an approach that investigates the deeper currents and flows of its streams, as pursued by Spotify Teardown (Eriksson et al. 2019) recently. With this conference we wish to engage with the many intersections of musical streams and invite papers that highlight the ways in which “streaming” characterize music and musical cultures.

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Not Ready to Make Nice – Power, Threats and Harassments in Popular Music

30. Annual Conference of the Gesellschaft für Popularmusikforschung
Host: Popakademie Baden-Württemberg
Dates: 25. – 27. September 2020

Locations: Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Mannheim/Popakademie Baden-Württemberg, Mannheim
in cooperation with Leuphana Universität Lüneburg as well as with the Jahrestagung des Bundesverbands Musikunterricht e.V.
Organizers: Michael Ahlers / David-Emil Wickström
Theme: Not Ready to Make Nice – Power, Threats and Harassments in Popular Music

Popular music cultures always reflect current social developments and debates, sometimes even forming a burning glass under which processes and products become even more clearly visible: In the context of the #metoo debates in the film industry, it quickly became clear that, unfortunately, various misconduct and institutional cover-up processes also take place on a regular basis in the music industry and at educational institutions. These processes have arguably existed for decades within the institutional education of prospective musicians and artists worldwide (!) (Lazar 2017; Payne et al. 2018; Knobbe & Möller 2018; Kerst 2019; Bartsch et al. 2019), but also within the global music industry. What is new is that musicians now have courage to speak up, show solidarity and increasingly bring accusations against sexual assaults to the public. One outcome is that in the area of so-called art music, for example, the Maestro cult is being demystified (Johnston 2017).

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The Autoethnography of Composition and the Composition of Autoethnography

Wednesday 17 June 2020, University of Glasgow
CFP: deadline for submissions 28 February 2020

The advent of autoethnography, a form of qualitative social science research that combines an author’s narrative self-reflection with analytical interpretation of the broader contexts in which that individual operates, holds particular significance for the field of music composition (broadly conceived). As a model for creative practice, autoethnography has been adopted by artists and researchers as a means of enfolding critical reflection upon social, cultural, and political identities and contexts into creative process and outcomes. It has similarly proven useful to practice-researchers, who are increasingly expected to produce written narratives to support and explain their musical creations. In particular, the expectation of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) that creative practice outputs will be contextualised through an accompanying commentary signals the importance of establishing scholarly structures appropriate to the discussion of one’s own work, a practice to which autoethnography is well-suited.

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Ethnomusicology Review Volume 23

Ethnomusicology Review is now accepting submissions for Volume 23, scheduled for publication in Fall 2021. Starting as Pacific Review of Ethnomusicology (PRE) in 1984, Ethnomusicology Review is a refereed journal managed by UCLA graduate students and a faculty advisory board. We maintain an extensive editorial board and publish interdisciplinary music research in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Indonesian, and other languages on a case-by-case basis.

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