The Songwriting Studies Journal

We are pleased to announce the launch of the Songwriting Studies Journal, an initiative that emerges from the AHRC-funded Songwriting Studies Research Network based at Birmingham City University and the University of Liverpool. Since launching our series of national research events we’ve become increasingly aware of the diversity of scholarly work that intersects with songwriting. The network now seeks contributions from scholars for an inaugural issue of the journal that will help define the emerging interdisciplinary field of songwriting studies.

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This Woman’s Work: A Kate Bush Symposium

Thursday 12th – Friday 13th December 2019, Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh

Over forty years into her career, Kate Bush continues to make significant contributions to various fields of culture. In recent months, her back catalogue has been re-released in remastered form, and a book of collected lyrics, How To Be Invisible, was published by Faber in 2018. The University of Edinburgh is pleased to announce that it will host a two-day symposium on Bush’s achievements. This event will mark and celebrate four decades of diverse productivity and offers a space for reflection on and discussion of this woman’s work. Despite her prolific creativity since the 1970s – covering the fields of music, film and video, literature, and performance – comparatively little scholarly work has been produced on Kate Bush. This symposium aims to start rectifying this omission: the organisers intend to produce an edited anthology collection developed from symposium proceedings.

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Listening to (Mainstream) Popular Music in 2020: Sounds and Practices

21–22 May 2020 
Department of Music, University of Innsbruck, Austria 

The interdisciplinary conference seeks to intensify the scientific discourse on the current sounds of popular music, and about those who stream, buy, talk about, like, use, and listen to them. The goal is to bring together different approaches unified by the interest in the cultural meanings, identities, experiences, and values that music without a clear subcultural context is being loaded with.

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Publication of Crosstown Traffic Conference Presentations

In September 2018, the University of Huddersfield hosted the IASPM UK and Ireland branch conference, collaborating with international research groups, ASARP, ISMMS, and Dancecult. We have now put online 131 presentations from the conference, as videos, mostly featuring powerpoint/keynote slides with speaking over the top. Please feel free to watch them, use them in teaching, post, embed, advertise or share them. We think this is an interesting model for conference publication, and the YouTube materials are citable publications in their own right. However we encouraged presenters to publish their papers in IASPM Journal, Dancecult Journal, Metal Music Studies Journal, or Art of Record Production Journal, as journal articles carry more weight than conference presentations.

You can view the presentations on this youtube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6UFkwpLwtkUz0HQ197kTsypPLaEntDTQ

And you can embed the playlist using this code. It includes keynote lectures by Franco Fabbri, Anne Danielsen, and record producer Andrew Scheps (producer of Metallica, Adele, Red Hot Chilli Peppers etc.

Agents and Actors: Networks in Music History: Sixth Sibelius Academy Symposium on Music History

Wednesday 3 June—Friday 5 June, 2020
Sibelius Academy, University of the Arts Helsinki, Finland
Deadline for submissions: September 30, 2019

The Fifth Symposium took institutionalisation as its theme in order to contribute to and clarify the ways in which they exert power, the relationships between then, and the hierarchies they establish. In the final plenary session, delegates debated a range of topics that might be given further consideration in the next symposium. The discussion largely focussed on two areas of interest – heritage andnetworks – and both were considered important current areas of work with which the next symposium could engage. It has been decided that the sixth symposium should concentrate on networks and music, while the seventh would focus on questions of heritage.

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IASPM-US 2020 Conference: “BPM: Bodies, Places, Movements”

May 21-23, 2020
Ann Arbor, Michigan

The International Association for the Study of Popular Music-United States chapter (IASPM-US) invites proposals for its annual conference, which will take place in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan on May 21-23, 2020. We welcome abstracts on all aspects of popular music, broadly defined, from any discipline or profession, and especially encourage submissions on the many rich popular music histories of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and Detroit.

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Putting the Empire into Music – Investigating the VIA Phenomenon

23rd–24th April 2020
Wissenschaftsforum Potsdam
Deadline: 30.10.2019
https://www.hsozkult.de/event/id/termine-40871?title=putting-the-empire-into-music-investigating-the-via-phenomenon&recno=19&q=&sort=&fq=&total=848

All across the Soviet Union, from Belarus to Central Asia, from Moscow to Georgia, the VIA phenomenon (Vokal’no–instrumental’nyi ansambl’) played a central role in Soviet popular music and culture. The label VIA applied to acts which were quite distinct from other musical genres and subcultures (bards, punk, rock and jazz) and was invented by the Soviet authorities in the early 1960s in order to counter the growing influence of Western pop music in the empire. From this date onwards until the end of the Soviet Union, a number of well-known popular musicians entered the scene and made a lasting impression on the Soviet and post-Soviet collective memory. Bands like Ariėl’, Pesniary, Gunesh, Vesëlye rebiata, Orėra, Siabry, Zemliane and Golubye Gitary blended different musical styles and genres like pop, beat, rock, jazz, synth-pop, progressive rock and electronic music; with catchy melodies, a good dose of experimentalism and a solid technique, and managed to gain popularity while maintaining high production and recording standards.

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International Summit on Gender, Sexuality, and Equity in Grove Music Online

University of Guelph (Canada)
May 29, 30, and 31, 2020

In the fall of 2019, Grove Music Online (GMO) will launch a comprehensive revision and expansion of its content relating to gender and sexuality. While its focus is on gender and sexuality, this endeavor presents an opportunity for all fields of music and sound scholarship— performance, education, composition, ethnomusicology, musicology, library science, music theory, and music therapy—to take an intersectional approach to addressing equity and inclusion of all kinds in print and digital reference documents (encyclopedias, dictionaries, indexes, educational materials, source books, score anthologies, museum exhibits, and so on). To that end, in collaboration with scholarly and community partners, the University of Guelph will hold a summit from May 29-31, 2020.

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Riffs: Call for Proposals

Technology is something I love and hate at the same time. One one hand the absence of any kind of technology means silence (or an environment of natural sounds which we hear much clearer because of the general silence); on the other hand, you need technology to make art’.

Christina Kubisch, ‘Artists’ Statements II: Christina Kubisch’, in The Cambridge Companion to Electronic Music, ed. by Nick Collins and Julio d’Escriván, 2nd edn (Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, 2017:176)

This issue of Riffs will engage with music and technology, and the ways in which we communicate our insights, observations, engagements and relationships between them. As the journal title suggests, we are interested in pieces that take an experimental approach to the analytical consideration of popular music. For examples of pieces based on previous prompts, have a look through our current and past issues, available to download from our website – www.riffsjournal.org.

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Punk and the Sacred

The Punk Scholars Network will be hosting a 1 -2 day symposium at Mansions of the Future (Lincoln, UK) on the 28^th and 29^th November 2019 on the theme of ‘Punk and the Sacred’ as part of the Punk Scholar’s Network’s series of themed symposiums.

The keynote will be delivered by Ross Haenfler.

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