Popular Music and the Anthropocene

Special issue of Popular Music
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/popular-music/article/popular-music-and-the-anthropocene-call-for-articles/2B5F3F43E89DE87FB651F483ECBD4658
François Ribac (University of Burgundy/IRCAM-APM) and Paul Harkins (Edinburgh Napier University)

Many geologists, climatologists, philosophers, historians, sociologists, activists, and Non-Governmental Organisations believe that our planet has now entered into the anthropocene era (Bonneuil & Fressoz 2013). The common idea is that human activities now have a decisive effect on the earth’s ecosystem: the fast and increasing disappearance of a considerable number of plant and animal species, the melting of glaciers and pack ice, rising sea levels, extreme climatic events, and pollution. These phenomena impact on human activities, leading to forced migrations, the pauperisation of entire communities (often those least responsible for climate change), and, ultimately, to major upheavals. The goal of this special issue of Popular Music is to understand how popular music should and can be described, analysed, and transformed in the Anthropocene, considered both as a concept as well as a material process.

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Things Have Changed: Twenty-First-Century Dylan

International Conference at Artois University, Arras, France
Thursday 6th-Friday 7th December 2018

Guest of Honour: Professor Sir Christopher Ricks

Ever since the early 1960s, Bob Dylan has never ceased to evolve. Hiscreativity remains as powerful as ever in the twenty-first century. Hencethe international symposium “Things have changed: Twenty-First-CenturyDylan” will focus primarily on contemporary Dylan. A theorization can bemade based on the work of Edward Saïd or Theodor Adorno (see Essays onMusic, 1993, quoted by Saïd). Said asserts that the late style of the artist is marked by “intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradictions” (E. Saïd, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain, New York: Pantheon Books, 2006, 7).

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“Twisting my memory, man” – music, memory and memoir

13th & 14th July 2018 – York St John University Campus

We are hosting an innovative two day event examining the ways that popular music is remembered and memorialised both as sonic experience and as cultural activity. Our event combines academic analysis and critical discussion with creative endeavour, performance and informal reminiscence.

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Listening Again to Popular Music as History

Editors: Nicholas Gebhardt and Paul Long
Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research
Birmingham City University

Submissions are invited for a special edition of Popular Music History that aims to listen again to popular music as historical source and to (re) consider the relationship of popular music and historical method.

Rationale

Jeffrey H. Jackson and Stanley C. Pelkey open their collection, Music and History(subtitle ‘Bridging the Disciplines’, 2005) by asking: ‘Why haven’t historians and musicologists been talking to one another?’  They suggest that at the heart of this absence is a problem of communication, concerning the distinct methods, knowledge and skills employed in both disciplines: does one need to be able to read, play or even ‘appreciate’ music for instance in order to make sense of it historically? On the other hand, do musicologists need an understanding of historiography to write histories of music? The issue for scholars in both disciplines is the status of the musical object: how to account for music asmusic, without losing a sense of its historical specificity.   Read the rest of this entry »

Elvis lives in Amsterdam: Manifestations of the imaginary musician

University of Amsterdam, 29 November – 1 December 2018 

Conference convenors: Rutger Helmers and Oliver Seibt

From Marvel’s Kiss comics of the late 1970s to Cate Blanchett and Heath Ledger acting out different facets of Bob Dylan’s public persona in Todd Hayne’s experimental film I’m not there; from continuous assertions that the guy on stage isn’t the real Paul McCartney to YouTube videos showing Nigerian Michael Jackson impersonators; from Hans Sachs, the sixteenth-century Meistersinger, still performing regularly in Wagner’s opera, to a virtual band like Gorillaz; from Adrian Leverkühn’s pact with the devil in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustusto the unsolved mystery of Chet Baker’s defenestration from Amsterdam’s Prins Hendrik Hotel.

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(Dis-)Orientations of Popular Music

28th Conference of the German Society for Popular Music Studies (GfPM)
Department of Music, Carl von Ossietzky University Oldenburg, Germany
16–18 November 2018

In Queer Phenomenology, Sara Ahmed describes orientation as a fundamental function of human experience. Significances of orientation range from inclinations and attitudes to processes of physical and spatial direction. In their multiple dimensions, orientations condition the way in which bodies experience strangeness, familiarity, normality, belonging, and displacement. As functions that fundamentally shape ways of being in the world, orientations therefore must be regarded as nodal points in the attribution of power and control. Orienting and disorienting means intervening into how we physically and mentally inhabit the world.

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Music in Science Fiction

Deadline: April 30, 2018 (abstracts); October 15, 2018 (full articles)

We invite you to submit articles for the volume 64 (2019) “Musik in der Science-Fiction / Music in Science fiction” of the yearbook “Lied und Populaere Kultur / Song and Popular Culture”. The yearbook is published by the Zentrum fuer Populaere Kultur und Musik (Freiburg University).

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Nightshift: Exploring Oxford’s Music Magazine

The Oxford Brookes Popular Music Research Unit (PMRU) presents:

Nightshift: Exploring Oxford’s Music Magazine

Richard Hamilton Building, Headington Hill site
Oxford Brookes University
Tuesday 27 March 2018, 9.45am – 4.00pm

Oxford’s local music magazine, Nightshift, will be the subject of a full day of discussion at Brookes University on Tuesday 27 March, hosted by the Popular Music Research Unit.

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There’s a song to be sung:  critical reflections on the music and influence of Johnny Clegg

Call for chapters

Proposal submission: 30 April 2018
Full chapters due: 31 January 2019

Introduction

As Johnny Clegg closes a chapter on his music career with his ‘The final journey’ concert tour (2017-2018), it is an appropriate and long overdue moment to reflect analytically on his musical career.
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Blackpool in the moving image and popular music

Call for Chapter Proposals

We would like to invite contributions for an upcoming edited collection exploring the historical and contemporary presence of Blackpool in popular music and the moving image.

“Whilst something of a ‘late developer’ as a tourist location, Blackpool’s geographical proximity to the densely populated industrial centres of Northern England coupled with the nineteenth century growth of the railway network dovetailing with increased working-class spending power led to Blackpool becoming the world’s first – and largest – working-class seaside resort.  By the end of the nineteenth century, with its three piers, a tower, as well as the country’s first electric tramway amongst other initiatives, Blackpool was hosting four million visitors a year and is pre-eminence amongst British seaside resorts catering for a working-class demographic was firmly established.

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