Corrupting Desires! Technique, Performance and Control

We are currently accepting submissions for Issue 2 of Cesura//Acceso, to be published in June 2016.

We want to think about how music is made and experienced – revealing limits, exclusions, desires, strategies, optimism and pessimism. Frustrations, constraints and manipulations of makers and listeners often condition the ways we can feel or think through our engagements with music. We want to prise these contradictions in music open, revealing some of its fractures, as well as its generative and emancipatory possibilities. Some of these might be related to:

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Occupied! Popular music, capital, state and society

In the times of privatization, regulation and bureaucratization, the main problem, regarding activities related to music, is who controls music in terms of its digital sharing, international free-trade and diminishing power of society in shrinking nation-states.

The main streams and potential topics of the proposed conference, though not exclusively, are:

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Classical Music ‘Hyper-Production’ and Practice-As-Research Conference

30th Jan. 2016

As the culmination to the AHRC funded project on Classical Music ‘Hyper-Production’ and Practice-As-Research, are hosting a combined live/online conference which will include live panel discussions from leading record producers, sound engineers, performers and composers, streamed online from London College of Music, University of West London.

The online conference comprises a series of peer reviewed online paper presentations and a blog. The paper presentations will take the form of a 3000 word text contribution, a 20 minute video presentation, or a slide show with spoken commentary. The blog-based panel discussions will be led by the invited speakers who will respond to the questions and comments of
the online participants.

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Mysterious Ways: U2 and Religion

Bloomsbury Studies in Religion and Popular Music
Edited by Scott Calhoun

I invite proposals for chapters in an edited collection with an interdisciplinary focus on U2 and religion for Bloomsbury’s series on Religion and Popular Music. U2’s art, inclusive of its songs, videos, live concerts, concert films, graphic design, live staging and production design, performance visuals, material artifacts, and activism, has long sought to investigate and present the human experience as also a religious endeavor, with metaphysical and physical concerns, and as such U2’s art is various, extensive, and culturally engaged.
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Resonancias – Musical Research Journal

Issue 38 (June 2016)
Guest editor: Víctor Rondón.

The journal Resonancias, published by the Music Institute at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile’s Faculty of Arts, invites specialists in musical research and/or related disciplines to send articles of their authorship presenting unpublished and relevant contributions in their areas. Articles written in Spanish, Portuguese and English will be accepted.

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Metal and Musicology

One-day conference sponsored by the International Society for Metal Music Studies
12 March 2016 at University of Hull, UK

The recent and burgeoning field of metal studies continues to foster an interdisciplinary approach to metal music culture, drawing academics from sociology, philosophy, anthropology, political science, business, religious studies, and many more diverse areas of study. Musicology’s contribution to metal studies is less pronounced. With the exceptions of pioneering work by Robert Walser and more recent texts by Jonathan Pieslak, Mark Mynett, and Esa Lilja (among some others), metal studies’ relationship with musicology is somewhat underdeveloped. Despite a more reflexive and inclusive musicology emerging since the 1980s and ‘90s, metal music has rarely figured in musicological discussion of popular music or avant-gardes. Given metal’s status as a music culture, and the supposed broadening of musicological thought, it seems timely that metal studies and musicology embrace one another more directly.

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IASPM UK and Ireland Biennial Conference: Popular Music: Creativity, Practice and Praxis

University of Sussex and the British and Irish Modern Music Institute (Brighton)
8-10 September 2016

Creativity is clearly a vital aspect of popular music and one which may be understood from a variety of perspectives, for example those of educators, composers, musicians, fans, music industry workers and critics. No doubt many of these perspectives overlap, not least for those with a foot in more than one of these camps. At the same time there are divergent opinions of how best to teach, study, theorise or practise creativity and this can hopefully lead to instructive debate.
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M/C Journal ‘Place’

The ways in which artists, musicians, filmmakers and other creative practitioners perceive, navigate and represent ‘place’ in their work is complex and multifaceted. Further, place-based conditions also influence the ways in which creative activity occurs in particular locales, raising questions regarding the role of history, economics, attitudes towards and perceptions of particular forms of arts and culture, shared social and creative contexts, and the geographical location of places, in shaping and fostering creativity. While the relationship between place and creative practice is now widely recognised across the social sciences, it remains poorly conceptualised at the level of specific forms of artistic and creative practices and creative industries. The aim of this issue is to therefore bring together scholarship from across a range of disciplines that is concerned with the relationship between place, broadly defined, and creativity, also broadly defined.
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Music, Pedagogy and Community

A symposium at University of South Wales, hosted by the Creative Industries Research Institute
Saturday, 5th of March 2016, the ATRiuM, 86-88 Adam Street, Cardiff

Keynote speaker: Professor Raymond MacDonald (University of Edinburgh)

The University of South Wales and the Creative Industries Research Institute will host a symposium on 5th of March on music, pedagogy and community. The symposium will explore ideas of how musical participatory practices can build a sense of community, and how pedagogical practices, formal but also and possibly more importantly informal, are a part of the process of social continuity in certain societies, cultures or sub-cultures.

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Music, Political Activism and the State

Wednesday 13 April 2016
University of Southampton, Highfield Campus, Southampton SO17 1BJ
One-day conference sponsored by the IMR and the University of Southampton
Keynote Speaker: Professor John Street (UEA)

In this one-day conference we seek to cultivate a dialogue concerning the intersections between music, political activism and the State, both among scholars from a range of disciplines and practitioners seeking to use music to contribute to social change. Whilst the importance of musical performance to political activism has long been reflected within the scholarly literature, more remains to be said about the ways that practices of protest or activist musicianship emerge in relation to the State, as an entity with a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, as a set of bureaucratic institutions (often with conflicting interests), and as a concept which individuals construct in everyday and official discourse. Particularly deserving of further attention are the ways that States – as legal institution and socially negotiated concept – may condition and create possibilities for creative musical practice.

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