Posted: October 14th, 2014 | Filed under: News | Comments Off on AHRC funding for UK/EU Arts and Humanities Doctoral Research Students
The Midlands3Cities Doctoral Training Partnership will be awarding 410 PhD studentships over a five year period to excellent research students in the arts and humanities. A collaboration between Birmingham City University, De Montfort University, Leicester, Nottingham University, Nottingham Trent University, and the University of Birmingham, the partnership provides research candidates with cross-institutional mentoring, expert supervision including cross-institutional supervision where appropriate, subject specific and generic training, and professional support in preparing for a career.
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Posted: October 9th, 2014 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on The Electric Guitar in Popular Culture
Friday March 27 and Saturday March 28, 2015
Bowling Green State University, Bowling Green, Ohio, USA
The Electric Guitar in Popular Culture aims to examine the roles of the electric guitar in cultures throughout the world. It is intended to serve as a space for academics, professionals, hobbyists and fans to engage in dialogue about topics related to the electric guitar and its cultural influence. We seek to explore the answers to many questions, including but not limited to:
- How has the electric guitar altered music and the lives of musicians throughout its history?
- How has the electric guitar impacted local music scenes in northwest Ohio and those throughout the world?
- Have changing representations of the guitar in popular culture impacted aspiring musicians?
- How have advances in technology impacted the production of electric guitars for both producers and consumers?
- How have various cultures and perspectives surrounding the electric guitar shifted over time?
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Posted: October 7th, 2014 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on Embracing the Margins: Counter-Mainstream Sensibilities in Popular Music
University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, March 27–28, 2015
Sponsored by the UNC Music Department and the AMS Popular Music Study Group
Keynote Speakers: Theo Cateforis (Syracuse) and Robin James (UNC–Charlotte)
What does it mean for musicians and fans to identify their own genre of popular music as marginal? What kind of cultural and aesthetic work is accomplished in this act? This type of stance has informed the politics and aesthetics of countless genres—from the more obvious manifestations of punk, indie, and experimental music to less-often affiliated traditions such as country, metal, jazz, blues, hip-hop, world music, R&B, folk, and electronic dance music. A sensibility of self-identified marginality can contribute to deeply ingrained notions of legitimacy, whether regarding musical style, social identification, spiritual conviction, or aesthetic values. Too often, however, studies of marginal musical identity have remained isolated within their respective genres or limited to the politics of social resistance.
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Posted: October 2nd, 2014 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on International Conference on the Multimodal Experience of Music
ICMEM, Sheffield, 23-25 March 2015
In live and virtual situations, music listening and performing are multimodal experiences: Sounds may be experienced tactically, music evokes visual images or is accompanied by visual presentations, and both generate vivid cross-modal associations in terms of force, size, physical location, emotion, fluency and regularity, among others.
ICMEM aims to bring together researchers from various disciplines who investigate the multimodality of musical experiences from different perspectives. Disciplines may include among others audiology, cognition, computer science, ethnomusicology, film studies, music performance and theory, neuroscience, philosophy, and psychology.
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Posted: September 22nd, 2014 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on Christian Congregational Music: Local and Global Perspectives Conference
Deadline for proposals: 12 December 2014
Conference dates: 4-7 August 2015
Conference website: http://congregationalmusic.org
Venue: Ripon College Cuddesdon, Oxford, United Kingdom
Congregational music-making is a vital and vibrant practice within Christian communities worldwide. It reflects, informs, and articulates convictions and concerns that are irreducibly local even as it flows along global networks. Congregational song can unify communities of faith across geographical and cultural boundaries; however, it can also be used to mark divisions between Christians of different denominations, cultural backgrounds, and social classes, and to negotiate or articulate difference in relation to religious outsiders. We therefore cannot understand the meanings, uses, and influences of congregational music within Christianity without exploring both its local contexts and its translocal, transnational, and global circulation.
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Posted: September 19th, 2014 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on Current Trends in Italian Popular Music Studies
Research Networking Colloquium
March 18-19 2015, University of Hull (UK)
Italian Popular Music Studies in the UK and USA has seen increased interest over recent years, with themed issues of prominent journals Modern Italy and Popular Musicin 2008, PhD projects recently completed and ongoing, and colloquia and workshops organised in 2012 and 2014 by Indiana University. This colloquium aims to bring together colleagues from the UK, Italy, the USA, and beyond, to continue the discussions around the place and prominence of popular music studies within the broader discipline of Italian Studies.
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Posted: September 17th, 2014 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on Special Issue of Popular Music on ‘Music and Alcohol’
Popular Music invites contributions to a Special Issue on Music and Alcohol
Popular music is littered with songs about alcohol, some condemning it, some celebrating it – ‘The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me)’, ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’, ‘One Mint Julep’, ‘Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee’, ‘What’s Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made A Loser Out Of Me)’, ‘I Drink’ and so on. Each genre has its own repertoire of such songs, and its own take on the pleasures and pain of alcohol. Songs about drinking have featured across time and throughout the world – from ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome to medieval troubadours and broadside ballad peddlers in Europe and across folk traditions in the Americas. But alcohol features in many other guises in popular music. In the UK there was even a genre directly associated with it: Pub rock; and in an earlier era in the US, prohibition and the speakeasy contributed to music’s social history. The drinks industry is a major sponsor of venues and festival, as well as of tours and artists. The laws on alcohol licensing are intimately tied to the regulation and zoning of live music. Meanwhile, those who warn of the dangers of alcohol have campaigned for an end to sponsorship and endorsement by the music industry and its stars. Psychologists have experimented with the relationship between the consumption of booze and music, while artists and others have made claims for the creative powers of drink. And finally, musicians have not just taken inspiration from the bottle, they have become implicated in its manufacture (Elbow are responsible for a beer called Charge and Status Quo for one called Piledriver; Sean ‘P Diddy’ Combs struck a profit share deal with Ciroc Vodka that involves him in developing the brand; a premium Jack Daniels is named in honour of Frank Sinatra; and Sting produces his own wine in Tuscany).
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Posted: September 16th, 2014 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on RMA Study Day: Authorship in Music
Friday 6 March 2015
Faculty of Music, University of Oxford
The question of authorship has been a central concern in poetics and literary theory for a long time and there is a large literature on this topic representing various critical perspectives. However, this sustained and systematic treatment of authorship has yet to be reflected in musicological discourse concerned with the particular conditions of musical practices.
Including an invited paper (‘I tell you what to do: autonomy, control and play in game compositions’) by Professor James Saunders (Head of Centre for Musical Research, Bath Spa University) and musical performances, this study day seeks to address and explore issues surrounding the notion of ‘authorship’ in relation to different kinds of engagement with music across cultures and genres and from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives including musicology, psychology, sociology, philosophy, ethnomusicology, and anthropology,
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Posted: August 28th, 2014 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on This is My City: Popular Music in Australasian Cities
Co-Editors: Shelley Brunt and Geoff Stahl
“Well I’m back in the land of second chances, And rock’n’roll shows where nobody dances
Back in the land of chicken and chips, Mars bars and roadside tips
And if you don’t like it, Then that’s too bad, Cos it’s the only city that we’ve ever had
This is my city…This is your city…This is our city now”
(“This is My City” Skyhooks – Melbourne, 1976)
Cities are indelibly connected with the production and consumption of popular music. This can take many forms: bands draw inspiration from living, working, and playing in urban centres; songs give emotional shape to cities via sonic and lyrical signifiers; fans and audiences sustain local scenes; rehearsal spaces offer contexts for musical collaboration and performance; large-scale festivals impart a sense of spectacle to cities; and gigs at small venues provide opportunities for moments of shared intimacy. In these and other important respects, popular music gives unique shape to the sociomusical experience of urban life.
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Posted: August 26th, 2014 | Filed under: Calls for Papers, IASPM Conferences | Comments Off on Frames of Listening: Popular Music and Visual Culture
IASPM-Canada 32nd Annual Conference
University of Ottawa – Carleton University, May 27/28 – 30, 2015
“Frames of Listening: Popular Music and Visual Culture” aims at exploring the intersections of sound and images across a range of popular music genres and cultural forms. With the advent of YouTube in 2005 and the proliferation of handheld technologies and social networking sites, musical-visual culture in a variety of forms has become readily accessible to millions worldwide. Even before the digital revolution, musical artists collaborated with visual artists to develop iconic images that had the power to shape identities, to communicate social messages, to strengthen genre affiliations, and to sell records. How do we receive and interpret the intersections of music and moving images in popular music? How do these multi-sensorial artistic expressions do cultural work and shape the world?
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