Popular Music, Stars and Stardom

IASPM ANZ Branch Conference 2015
School of Music, The Australian National University, Canberra, ACT, December 4th – 6th 2015

‘Stars’ manifest in popular music literally, conceptually and metaphorically through song lyrics, artist ‘stage names’ and in discourses of economic and/ or mainstream success (Hamlen Jnr., 1991; Holmes, 2004). Stars can be conceptualised as ‘mythic constructs’ (Shuker, 2005) ‘other worldly’ (McLeod, 2003) or associated with fantasy and escapism. As performers, ‘stars’ have been considered as ‘manufactured’ (Franck and Nüesch, 2007) and/ or ‘authentic’ (Zuberi, 2001); as groups of individual artists, such as ‘Superstar DJs’ (Phillips, 2009), or the individual persona, such as ‘Ziggy Stardust’ (Grant, 2000). In recent years, popular music stardom is closely associated to reality television (Frith, 2007), a site of tension between influences of traditional auteur and public ‘star maker’ roles. The portrayal of popular music ‘stars’ on film varies between those in the foreground (Rock Star, 2001), in the background (20 Feet from Stardom, 2013) and those in supporting or ‘behind the scenes’ roles (Muscle Shoals, 2013).

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Popular Music Futures

10^th and 11^th of September 2015, Cardiff University School of Music

The 2015 IASPM UK and Ireland postgraduate conference, to be held at Cardiff University, invites papers exploring Popular Music futures. As technology and the music industries develop, academia is being drawn to examine and predict how Popular Music will develop as an art form and an economic resource. This conference seeks to be an open forum for new and innovative approaches to all aspects of Popular Music Studies as well as invite the opportunity for the next generation of academics to present to peers.

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The 10th Art of Record Production Conference: Cultural Intersections

November 6-8, 2015, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

Deadline Extended to April 12th 2015: midnight GMT +6

Confirmed Speakers include: Joe Tarsia of Sigma Sound Studios, ‘Philly Sound’ songwriter Kenny Gamble and Professor Trevor Pinch of Cornell University

Our conference committee is pleased to invite proposals for papers dealing with the following broad thematic areas:

A    Agency: Content Creators in Record Production

This stream aims to explore the creative agency within record production. Who or what is in charge (officially or tacitly)? Is sound recording inherently collaborative? What are the correlations or disunions associated with the creative process? Who are the future agents in record production? What agency does/will the consumer hold? What is DIY in sound production and how has it changed over time? How does DIY and technology intersect? How will iOS music makers alter the future of music production? How does media representation influence record production and vise versa?

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Media and Cultural Work: A Resource for Better Working Life in the Arts and Media

Dear colleagues,

Today sees the launch of a new website, MEDIA AND CULTURAL WORK: A RESOURCE FOR BETTER WORKING LIFE IN THE ARTS AND MEDIA: http://mediaculturalwork.org

The title should hopefully make its function clear. It’s for activists, campaigners and public interest groups as much as for academics. It’s intended to be international. The launch of this website coincides with unprecedented media interest in questions of representation and inequality in cultural production. What has long been apparent to scholars in the field – that the cultural industries are less ethnically diverse, more male and skewed towards those of a higher socio-economic background that most other parts of the economy – seems to have become, at least briefly, ‘news.’ We hope to provide a forum where these and related issues can be discussed and where related research and activities can be publicised.

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International Conference on Music Since 1900

University of Glasgow, School of Culture and Creative Arts, September 2015.

The Ninth Biennial International Conference on Music Since 1900 will take place at the University of Glasgow, School of Culture and Creative Arts, from Monday 7^th September to Wednesday 9^th September, 2015. We invite proposals for papers on any topic relating to 20^th– and 21^st-century music conceived in the broadest possible terms, including sound studies and inter-media arts. We welcome all methodological approaches, and particularly encourage submissions that question disciplinary boundaries and/or propose interdisciplinary perspectives.

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Music and Sound at Work

London Conference in Critical Thought
University College London, 26-27 June 2015

This conference stream seeks to provoke discussion around ways in which music and sound could be considered ‘at work’. This construction has two distinct but overlapping and complementary senses.

1. The acoustic ecology of the world of work: encompassing instances in which workers have soundtracked their labour; or used music to comment on working conditions.
2. Sound and music that has been put to work: emphasising the exploitation of aural properties for specific social, economic or (bio)political ends (to drive the labour of consumption, for example).

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Equinox Studies in Ethnomusicology

Book series editors: Simone Krüger and Britta Sweers

Equinox Studies in Ethnomusicology publishes monographs and edited collections on contemporaneous explanations surrounding the nature of music and human beings in a (post-)global world. Books in this series encompass a comprehensively wide selection of subject matters alongside a shared interest in fieldwork—physical, virtual, historical—and its complex challenges and fascinations in a postcolonial age.

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PERFORMA – Conference on Musical Performance Studies

The University of Aveiro and INET-MD (Institute of Ethnomusicology – Centre for Music and Dance Studies) and the Brazilian Association of Musical Performance (ABRAPEM) will host PERFORMA’15, a conference on performance studies, from June the 11th until June the 13th, 2015 in Aveiro, Portugal. The organization is with the collaboration of the Graduate Studies Program of the Instituto de Artes of the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul. The keynote-speakers will be Prof. Marcel Cobussen, from the Leiden University in the Netherlands (and from Orpheus Institute in Ghent, Belgium), and Prof. Tia DeNora, from the University of Exeter, UK. This conference seeks to generate and present new perspectives on musical performance through interdisciplinary dialogue. The main theme for the 2015 edition will be performance practice as research with three specific research topics:

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U:Pop – The First International Popular Music Studies Undergraduate Conference

The University of Northampton, United Kingdom
Saturday 30^th May 2015

As the academic study of popular music has developed over the last thirty years, reaching both across disciplines and across the globe, our understanding of the economic, social, political and cultural significance of this most ubiquitous of forms has only become ever more sophisticated and dynamic. Whilst the discipline(s) has developed both scholars of international repute and a thriving postgraduate research body, the work produced by undergraduate students studying relevant courses has had little opportunity to be recognized outside their own institutions.

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Journal of Music, Technology and Education

Special issue on Technology and Performance in Popular Music Education

Guest editors: Gareth Dylan Smith and Bryan Powell

Performance in popular music education is an increasingly technologised space. As guitars, drums and microphones are gaining greater acceptance in school music curricula around the world through performance-based pedagogical models, such as the Modern Band curriculum of Little Kids Rock, and Musical Futures’ informal learning approach. Turntablism, music production and rapping have a growing presence in programmes from primary school to graduate level. Songwriting courses, rock camps and international collaborative pop projects sprout up globally in physical spaces and on line, while children and young people write, produce and release multi-media popular music artefacts from their bedrooms and basements. Popular music has always relied on, grown through, and pushed innovation in technology. With students embracing change faster than many teachers can imagine relevant pedagogical approaches, new paradigms of performance are emerging: drummers become musical directors at the helm of a plethora of technologies, bassists play synthesizers as much as guitars, and front-people are masters of Ableton, loop pedals and computerized gloves. As performance and production skill sets thus diversify and converge, so other technologies democratize the music-making landscape.

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