Transposition Issue 8 (2019): Music: Intangible Heritage?

http://transposition.revues.org/1143

Coordination: Elsa Broclain, Benoît Haug & Pénélope Patrix

In 2017, almost a third of the files submitted to UNESCO for inscription on the Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH) lists include a significant musical component. Greek Rebetiko could) thereby join more than seventy listed forms of “music” – often associated with celebrations, dances, poetry and know-how – such as the Tango of Rio de la Plata, Shashmaqam of Central Asia, Brazilian Samba de Roda, and Tar craftsmanship and performance in Azerbaidjan. Applications have poured in since the 2006 entry into force of the International Convention for the Safeguarding of ICH, which established a new heritage paradigm based on practices and communities rather than monuments and artefacts[1], according to the perspective of “new heritages” and their aim to cultivate more open and participatory practices[2]. Outside the realm of the United Nations, this new category of “intangible heritage” has infused into the vocabulary and approaches taken by national registers, and into local cultural policy, heritage-related and museum activities, and the general discourse, generating a variety of modes of appropriation and contention. Considering the far-reaching implications, this issue of Transposition aims to explore the specific case of music in the domain of “intangible cultural heritage”, both within and beyond the framework used by UNESCO.

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Songwriting

The editors of the Journal of Popular Music Education invite papers for a special issue on songwriting, guest edited by Andrew West.

Songwriting has received increasing scholarly attention in recent years, commensurate with growth of programmes at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and expansion of songwriting provision in schools. Songwriting practices have evolved to encompass domains formerly the preserve of producers, engineers, composers, and arrangers. Songwriting can be found at the heart of work in music therapy, community projects, and big business. The realm of the genius, the muse, the pop culture icon, and the person on the street, songwriting to many people is at the core of what it means to be human.

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Ambient@40

Deadline: 17.00 (GMT), Friday 5^th January 2018.

In the forty years since the release of Brian Eno’s Music for Airports the concept and aesthetics of ambient music have proliferated, influencing artists as diverse as Taylor Deupree, Steven Wilson, David Lynch and The Orb, infusing drone, microsound, minimalism and experimental electronic music as well as aspects of contemporary instrumental music. The aim of this two-day conference is to re-appraise ambient music in relation to Eno’s milestone release.

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Queerness, Voice, Embodiment

2nd Symposium of the LGBTQ+ Music Study Group
https://lgbtqmusicsg.wordpress.com
20th-21st April 2018
Maynooth University (near Dublin)

Deadline: December 11, 2017

Elizabeth Woods’s essay ‘Sapphonics’ (1994) set in motion new discourses on the voice in music studies. With an example of the unique expressive qualities of lesbian difference and desire, Sapphonics questions the universally assumed traits of physical vocal mechanisms to emphasise the particular embodied circumstances of production and performance. Grappling with similar questions of difference and agency, Gayatri Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ (1988) articulated the predicament of Subaltern voices addressing issues of(post) coloniality and patriarchy. Neither essay delimits the possibilities of what voicing entails, rather both cut across disciplinary boundaries in search of voices that intersect various dimensions of identity, including gender, sexuality, race, class, caste, to name a few.

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Maximising student compositional and performance creativity within Higher Popular Music Education (HPME) courses.

Michael Tippett Centre, Bath Spa University, 24th February, 2018.

CFP: deadline for submissions 15 December, 2017

Keynote Speakers: Cliff Jones (BIMM, Gay Dad, Radiophonic Workshop); Dr Louise Jackson (Trinity Laban), Drew Morgan (BIMM, Halo 4, Davidge, Modulus iii)

Overview:

‘As a relatively new HE discipline, and the (largely) orally transmitted nature of the music, the teaching is still, I feel, being explored and developed.’ (Respondent cited in Cloonan and Hulstedt, 2012)

Since the amalgamation of new universities in 1992 the development of Higher Popular Music Education courses has increasingly expanded, with there now being 47 institutes or universities that have undergraduate popular music courses (Cloonan and Hulstedt, 2012). There has been research centered around creative pedagogies within Higher Popular Music Education (Burnard,2012; Haddon et al, 2016; Parkinson and Smith, 2015) and this is an opportunity to collate and collect practices that have influenced the development of student musicians within Universities and Institutes which teach popular music. With the rise in student fees and constant changes to the current popular music industry, it now seems more vital than ever to look at pedagogical practices and philosophies, to see if student creativity is being maximised. Are the Universities and Institutes that deliver HPME helping to develop popular musicians who will make a creative impact on the current popular music industry?

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Peripheral/ geographically isolated

Despite advancements in technology facilitating an ease with which geographical distance can be overcome, coupled with a shift away from a reliance on core creative centres for a range of creative and business services, peripheral and geographically isolated contemporary music scenes continue to face a range of challenges which impact upon the ways in which they connect with new audiences and industry beyond their home locale. This ranges from needing to make higher investments of time and money, to having to overcome attitudinal and cultural barriers in order to be viewed as worthy of prominent attention. More broadly, geographic isolation also impacts upon the ways in which culture can flow into these scenes, particularly in the live music setting. At the same time, however, this distance can also result in a range of benefits to these scenes in relation to the ways in which they are structured and how they function locally. This includes cultivating a recognition of the need to support one another, a high degree of expertise and skills concentrated on a small number of workers and a tight network of spaces, as well as the development of a strong work ethic to make the most of opportunities when they arise.

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5th European Conference on Social Media

21-22 June 2018, Limerick Institute of Technology, Ireland

Mini Track on Social Media and the DIY Artist: How the development of social media has impacted on the music industries
Mini Track Chair: Dr Paul Oliver, University of West London. UK

Since the inception of the internet, DIY (do-it-yourself) artists and entrepreneurs working within the music industries have used social media in sophisticated ways to collaborate, create and disseminate their music online. Initially in the early 2000s with MySpace, then with Facebook and YouTube and now with Instagram and Snapchat, social media has revolutionised the way DIY artists and fans, and the wider music community, can interact with each other. Moreover, social media platforms have begun to expand and elaborate on existing features developing stronger possibilities to interact through live video streaming and storytelling which, in turn, makes it easier for organic DIY music communities to form on a global scale based on niche interests.

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AMS/SMT Alternative-Format Joint Session on Hip-hop Studies

In the introduction to his 2000 book Making Beats: The Art of Sample Based Hip-Hop, Joseph Schloss notes the relative absence of music studies:

“It does no disservice to previous work to say that [hip-hop studies] has tended to focus on certain areas (such as the influence of the cultural logic of late capitalism on urban identities, the representation of race in popular culture, etc.) to the exclusion of others (such as the specific aesthetic goals that artists have articulated). Nor is it a criticism to say that this is largely a result of its methodologies, which have, for the most part, been drawn from literary analysis. We must simply note that there are blank spaces and then set about to filling them in.”
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Riffs: Experimental Writing on Popular Music

The editorial team of Riffs: Experimental Writing on Popular Music invite 300 word / one page of A4 (visual) proposals for the next 2018 volume from PhD, MA, and outstanding undergraduate students, based on the following prompt:

“There is nothing wrong with hating rock critics” – Of Montreal, 2003

Your response should consider in some way journalistic and academic forms of writing and critiquing popular music, and the overlap between these two forms/forums. This volume will be guest edited by Laura Snapes, a music and culture writer based in London.

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Past and Present: Local Music Making and the Politics of Popular Music

27 January 2017, 11:00 – 16:30, The Red House (Old Town Hall), Merthyr Tydfil, CF47 8AE

Join us for a free one-day research and industry event marking the launch of a one-month exhibition celebrating the hidden history of popular music in Merthyr Tydfil, between 1955-1975. The event is organised by Centre for Media and Culture in Small Nations at the University of South Wales. The event is free and lunch is provided, but must be pre booked via Eventbrite.

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