Posted: June 7th, 2013 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »
The University of Northampton, United Kingdom
6th and 7th June 2014
It has increasingly become a truism to suggest that contemporary popular music practice is in a state of flux. Established patterns of consumption, distribution and production have at the very least been revolutionised by the opportunities afforded by digitalisation and the internet. While subcultural identities may have become increasingly adopted by mainstream media, the proliferation of media outlets has contributed to an increasingly varied and cosmopolitan listening experience both in terms of stylistic breadth but also in terms of historical depth. While some commentators have sounded the death-knell of the music industry, others see an opening-up of opportunity for musicians and audiences around the world that may be far more liberating than at any time since the dawn of recorded music.
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Posted: May 16th, 2013 | Filed under: Calls for Papers, IASPM Conferences | No Comments »
5th and 6th September, University of Glasgow
The 2013 IASPM UK and Ireland postgraduate conference, to be held at the University of Glasgow, invites papers exploring the cultural value of popular music. In light of the AHRC’s recently launched two-year Cultural Value Project (www.ahrc.ac.uk/funded-research/funded-themes-and-programmes/cultural-value-project), the conference will focus on both the experience of popular music and the economic and social benefits such an experience provides.
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Posted: April 18th, 2013 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »
Music is being fundamentally transformed by digitisation and digital media. With the growth of internet access across the developing and the developed world, and the accelerating appearance of mobile and new media platforms in which music plays a critical affective role in attaching users, digitisation is fostering a range of escalating changes that radically alter the environment for the creation, circulation and consumption of music. Not only creative and distributive practices, but the nature of music as a cultural object are evolving in far-reaching ways. Institutional and industrial reconfigurations are paralleled by the renegotiation of intellectual and cultural property regimes, by new musical literacies, and by the emergence of novel sonic materialities, new aesthetics and genres. Digitisation inflects longstanding musical subjectivities and gender dynamics; it demands new thinking about the periodisations and temporal assumptions that govern the historiography of late-20th- and 21st-century music. But these changes also have wider repercussions, since music is often held to be in the vanguard of the changes to contemporary cultures and cultural economies afforded by digitisation. The fate of digitised music is thus taken to portend what is to come for audio-visual media as, increasingly, they circulate through the internet and via sites such as YouTube.
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Posted: March 6th, 2013 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »
Friday 28th June 2013
Organised by Oxford Brookes’ Popular Music Research Unit (PMRU) in association with the Network of Punk Scholars (NPS).
20 years since legendary anarcho-punk group Crass released their highly challenging LP Yes Sir, I Will, this symposium will explore the impact and long-lasting legacy of Crass and anarcho-punk. Crass are widely perceived as ‘reluctant leaders’ of the anarcho-punk scene; an ironic title for self-proclaimed anarchists, of course. The central question, for this study day, is: were Crass and anarcho-punk scene significantly effective politically or, alternatively, was the anarcho-punk scene surreptitiously more about clothes, music, image and ‘symbolic rebellion’ (to use Adorno’s term)?
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Posted: February 13th, 2013 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »
Call for Papers: Special Issue of Culture, Theory and Critique
Music, Music Making and Neoliberalism
Theorizing the relationship between music and capitalist processes has been an ongoing concern for scholars in a number of disciplines. Marx’s passing characterization of music as a form of unproductive labor, at worst a form of labor in a process of transition, would set the stage for much theorizing regarding the fate of music and music making under capitalism. Much of the music-related scholarship dealing with capitalism has been primarily interested in the production, consumption and circulation of various musical texts (pieces of music, musical genres, specific artists or bands, and so on). Critics have also addressed the broader implications of this dynamic to the act of music making, in one way or another, suggesting that music’s ability to critique, resist or cope with capitalism was predicated in its ability to remain at least partially independent from processes of mass production and consumption. Such approaches emphasize the notion that music’s engagement with capitalism begins at the moment when these texts and practices enter the marketplace, along the way complicating but not necessarily questioning whether music remains a form of unproductive labor, particularly in the context of late capitalism.
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