We will be hosting a 1-2 day symposium at Mansions of the Future in Lincoln (UK) on the 4th and 5th of July 2019* on the subject of punk pedagogies as part of the Punk Scholars’ Network’s series of themed symposiums.
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.
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.
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.
(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?
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.
Home of Metal Symposium and Workshop
13-14th September 2019
Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research, Birmingham City University
PUBLIC SYMPOSIUM
Friday 13th September 2019
This public symposium seeks to bring together researchers, policy makers, heritage and creative workers and musicians.
We welcome contributions from fans and heritage consumers in response to their experience of the Home of Metal exhibitions and events.
Home of Metal (HoM) is a heritage project created and led by the Capsule organisation. Launched in 2011, supported by volunteers, building a crowd-sourced archive and curating a range of popular public events in Birmingham and the Black Country, HoM seeks to highlight and celebrate the value of Heavy Metal music and culture and the role in it of founding artists from the English midlands such as Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and Judas Priest. In 2017 the project went international in its reach, exploring metal culture around the world with a particular focus on Black Sabbath. As a result, in 2019 a range of exhibitions and events will take place in ‘celebration of an artform created in Birmingham that maintains significant global reach and influence.’ The value of this approach is indicated by the Wall Street Journal that has described the genre as the real ‘World Music’, that ‘Heavy Metal has become the unlikely soundtrack of globalisation’ (2016).
Special Issue of Popular Music and Society
Guest-edited by Johannes Brusila, Martin Cloonan, and Kim Ramstedt
Popular Music and Society invites article proposals for a special issue that examines the connections between music, digitalization, and democracy. The impact of digitalization on the production, dissemination, and consumption of popular music has been immense since the 1980s. Scholars, artists, and policymakers have depicted this “digital turn” as being both a potential enhancement of, and a threat to, cultural life. Business futurists have described increasing financial possibilities created by the new lower cost structures, and visionaries have predicted a greater cultural freedom for larger population groups.
29th Annual Conference of the German Society for Popular Music Studies
GfPM, Johannes Gutenberg University, Mainz
1 – 3 November 2019
The German pop star Xavier Naidoo, who appeared in the ZDF television studio for the 2006 World Cup Semifinal costumed in the colors of the German flag; the far-right “identitarian” group Les Brigandes, who ceremonially bury the French colors in the video for their song “L’heure de dire adieu”; the 12-point scoring system of the annual Eurovision Song Contest; U.S. “pop presidents” Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the “national” and “international” categories of the (now defunct) German ECHO awards; radio quotas in France and Germany; continuing references to the “British Invasion” of the 1960s; even the Global Popular Music Series published by Routledge since 2015, of which almost every volume is titled “Made In (insert country here)”: examples of pop music being saddled with symbols representing or affirming “national identity” are practically endless.
Following the groundbreaking publication of The Punk Reader: Transmissions from the Local to the Global (now in its second edition through Intellect Books and the Punk Scholars Network) the series editors would like to invite proposals for a second volume in the book series Global Punk, to be published in early 2020. The publication will be part of an exciting collaboration between Intellect Press and the Punk Scholars Network, a partnership that has seen the development of a Punk Scholars Network imprint.