Researching Subcultures and Aesthetics Postgraduate Symposium: Alternative Voices in Academia

10 September 2019, National University of Ireland, Galway

Punk Scholars Network invites proposals for presentations as part of our postgraduate symposium on subcultures and aesthetics at National University of Ireland, Galway. This symposium will explore how subcultures connect to aesthetics and createwhat Pierre Bourdieu calls the space of possibles, a space for radical politics to be formed through the means of artistic productions. From do-it-yourself methods of street art to the shock-effect of Dadaist and punk attitudes in different time-places, the close relationship between subcultures and aesthetics continues to reflect the turbulences of our political atmosphere. From music and literatureto cinema and other art forms, this symposium will offer a platform for postgraduate students who wish to share their research, explore critical approaches and analyse the complexities of the relationship between subcultures and aesthetics.

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Our music, our world: wind bands and local social life

International conference, October 10th-12th, 2019

Hosted and organized by the University of Aveiro and INET-md (Portugal) and co-organized by the International Society for the Promotion and Research of Wind Music (IGEB)

The research team project “Our music, our world: Musical associations, wind bands, and local communities (1880-2018)” is pleased to invite submissions of proposals for the International conference Our music, our world: wind bands and local social life, to be held in Aveiro, at the Departamento de Comunicação e Arte da Universidade de Aveiro, from the 10th to 12th of October 2019.

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Mid-Atlantic Popular & American Culture Association (MAPACA) 2019 Annual Conference

November 7-9, 2019 Pittsburgh, PA — Pittsburgh Marriott City Center Hotel

MAPACA’s (Mid-Atlantic Popular and American Culture Association) Music Area aims to study and advance understandings of the relationship between music and popular culture in various contexts. The area is open to many disciplines and scholarly perspectives. Presenters are encouraged to submit their best work on any topic related to the music of the America’s. This may include but is not limited to:

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Jazz and Cultural Identity: In and Out of Europe

A One-Day Conference with George McKay, Catherine Tackley and Alyn Shipton, June 7th 2019, University of Central Lancashire

This conference will bring together the latest research in jazz as it has been appropriated, assimilated and created/recreated in European culture. As the question of Europe is being put under pressure by Brexit and nationalist movements across the continent, this conference will seek to situate jazz as both a marginal and mainstream cultural practice which is inherently borderless and multivalent.

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Punk Pedagogies

We will be hosting a 1-2 day symposium at Mansions of the Future in Lincoln (UK) on the 4^th and 5^th of July 2019* on the subject of punk pedagogies as part of the Punk Scholars’ Network’s series of themed symposiums.

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The Present and Future of Music Law and Practice

Monday 1st July 2019 – University of Central Lancashire, Preston

A conference which will examine the intersection between music and law, with a particular focus on the current legal and business challenges posed by a morphing, transnational, mid-digital marketplace.

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Perspectives on Music Production: 3-D Audio

Arguably the most rapidly expanding area of audio production is that of 3-D audio – surround sound with representation of height. Such playback is increasingly commonplace in cinemas, and multi-speaker home setups and sound-bars are following. In parallel, headphone-based 360° spatial audio is experiencing huge growth, and the technologies that underpin this are steadily improving. Such listening is being driven by virtual and augmented reality, and beyond gaming, soon such applications will proliferate into many areas of daily life – from productivity to education, through social networking to music playback.

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Popular Music and Narrativity

1-day conference, Senate House, London, 7 June 2019
CfP Deadline: March 30, 2019

Confirmed keynote speaker: Prof Nicholas Reyland, Royal Northern College of Music

Narrativity — the property of conveying or otherwise evoking a story — is one of the most compelling components of popular music. Storytelling in music can operate in complex and, at times, ambiguous ways that are distinct and sometimes divergent, from other narrative media such as film, television and literature, offering the exciting opportunity of media-conscious analytical approaches. As entertainment music media have evolved, so has how and where this type of narrativity operates, from the pub and music hall to screen media, the sphere of private listening and the internet. Moreover, the organisation of sound through technology (e.g. studio-based production and mixing) has created new parameters for expression that raise new opportunities to interrogate narrativity beyond lyrics or notated detail. Finally, encouraged by the increasing presence of music on the internet, there are now more forms within which narrativity can emerge than ever before, such as multimedia concept albums, long-form music video and transmedia projects rooted in popular music.

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Experts, non-experts and participatory construction of knowledge: the case of research on popular music

(Dir. Christophe Pirenne and Christophe Levaux, U Liège, Belgium)

After four decades of institutionalising popular music studies, the subjects and objectives defined in several essential texts published from the end of the 1970s onwards (Frith 1978, Tagg 1982, Wicke 1990, Middleton 1990), seem to have been largely covered. Whether in terms of methodology, interdisciplinarity, decompartmentalisation or decentralisation; or even in terms of institutional recognition and integration into the academic sphere, the knowledge acquired has been considerable to the point of sometimes influencing, in return, the disciplines from which popular music studies originally drew its inspiration. However, many questions remain unanswered. Have popular music studies truly embraced all types of popular music? Have popular music specialists really succeeded in studying the repertoires listened to by all social groups? Hasn’t the initial struggle of popular music studies against various forms of cultural elitism actually been transposed to popular repertoires? Can we refer to over- or under-representation in the scope of styles, genres and communities associated with them? Can or should a balance be guaranteed and how? Do the studies relating to the participatory construction of knowledge offer new opportunities for the study of popular music? Is it ultimately a question of rethinking the role of experts and non-experts in the elaboration of narratives relating to the latter?

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Producing concerts, working in live music

Congress of the Swiss Sociological Association 2019
The Future of Work
September 10-12 2019, University of Neuchâtel

Live music has long been neglected by music scholars (Frith, 2007); however it is now subject to renewed interest. Recently, researchers have focused on the economics of live music (Holt, 2010; Guibert and Sagot-Duvauroux, 2013; Behr et al., 2016) and the work of musicians (Perrenoud, 2007; Bennett, 2017; Perrenoud and Bataille, 2017). However, the “support personnel” (Becker, 2010) needed in order to produce concerts is still not frequently studied. Little is known about the different occupations (technicians, bookers, programmers) and organizations (festivals, ticket
retailers, public funders) required to produce concerts, but also to market live music, and to exploit it in other formats (e.g. live broadcasting, recording). In order to address this gap, this workshop proposes to explore three areas of investigation.

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