Biennial IASPM-UK/Ireland conference: Imagining Communities Musically: Putting Popular Music in its Place

Biennial IASPM-UK/Ireland conference
September 7-9, 2012
Salford University

Albion … Chocolate City … Highway 61 … Route 66 … Wonderland … Strawberry Fields … the Crossroads … Beale Street … Haight Ashbury … Music City U.S.A.

Popular music has always been affiliated with physical places, both literal and imaginary. It is one of the ways that the inhabitants of those locations define both their residence and themselves. To borrow the components of the title of Benedict Anderson’s widely read book, one of the most telling ways communities imagine themselves is acoustically. An indissoluble connection exists between musical expression and geography, both the landscape of actual locale and that conjured up by the mind. The persistent academic interest in the notion of scenes reflects this set of circumstances. So too does the research that examines how the state defines itself sonically and, in some cases, pursues its objectives with the assistance of acoustic apparatus, as in the torture of prisoners by a barrage of undesired sound. In addition, there are those composers, performers, compositions and performance practices that are thought to be quintessential expressions of states, peoples or defined populations.

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Going Underground? Gender and Subcultures

Day Symposium at the University of Northumbria
Friday 7^th September 2012

The notion of ‘subcultures’, articulated most prominently by Dick Hebdige in his 1979 seminal work, Subculture: The Meaning of Style, has undergone much revision in recent years. However a critical engagement with gender remains absent within the majority of work on ‘subcultures’. Indeed, Angela McRobbie’s (1980) ‘Settling Accounts with Subcultures: A Feminist Critique’ provides the cornerstone of our symposium, in terms of interrogating how gender is articulated in ‘underground’ cultural and social environments. The question of whether ‘subculture’ is still a valid term and how far ‘subcultural’ manifestations are reductively incorporated into the mainstream are relevant topics on the academic agenda. However research of girls and women’s subcultural productions and engagements from queer, feminist and transgender scholars (e.g. Jack Halberstam, Doreen Piano, Susan Driver, Elizabeth K Keenan, Mary Celeste Kearney and Kath Browne) carve out a new territory for understanding the ‘subcultural’. Given this reevaluation, it is timely to re-engage with how ‘subcultural’ genders (both femininities and masculinities) are represented in alternative society and discuss how far this can be politically subversive. For instance, the revival, nostalgia and popularity of rockabilly style, burlesque, roller derby, Slutwalks, Ladyfests, fanzine/blogging networks, Suicide Girls, Guerrilla Girls, riot grrrl and the participation of girls in underground music cultures all point to the need for an academic engagement with strategies of cultural resistance to dominant identities and norms.

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Brian Eno

Call for contributors: 

On the back of his published diary (A Year with Swollen Appendices, Faber 1996) Brian Eno describes himself variously as: a mammal, a father, an artist, a celebrity, a pragmatist, a computer- user, an interviewee, and a ‘drifting clarifier’. To this list we might add rock star (on the first two Roxy Music albums); the creator of lastingly influential music (Another Green World; Music for Airports); a trusted producer (for Talking Heads, U2, Coldplay and a host of other artists); the maker of large-scale video and installation artworks; a maker of apps and interactive software; and so on, and so on. All in all, he is one of the most feted and most influential musical figures of the past forty years (even though he himself has consistently downplayed his musical abilities, describing himself as an anti-musician on more than one occasion).

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Perspectives on Musical Improvisation

10th-13th September 2012
Faculty of Music, University of Oxford

Conference theme

Improvisation is arguably the most widely distributed form of musical practice – and yet remains the least studied or understood. Indeed, even the boundaries of what is or is not regarded as improvisation remain unclear. This conference will address the many faces of improvisation from a wide range of disciplinary perspectives – historical, psychological, ethnomusicological, analytical, technological, sociological, organological, and pedagogical. Over the course of four days, the conference will include papers, practical sessions, and poster presentations.

The conference is affiliated to the AHRC-funded Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice (CMPCP) and enjoys the support of SEMPRE, IMR, BFE, and SMA.

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Music and Queer Theory

Call for contributions – Transposition. Musique et sciences sociales nº 3

(http://transposition-revue.org)

Queer theory is likely one of the most well-known and controversial recent schools of thought, and its impact has been felt in the academic world and beyond. It appeared in the early 1990s in the United States, as a direct offshoot of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered) collectives, the work of Foucault (in particular, his History of Sexuality and ideas such as “biopolitics”), and Derrida’s deconstructionism. This school of thought, while in no way a homogenous trend, is characterized by the questioning of the notion of gender and the idea that sexual identity and behaviour would be genetically determined. In this context, queer theory formulates the hypothesis that sexuality is actually a social construction. This presumes that sexuality is not biologically stamped on human nature, but rather takes on ever-changing social forms, wherein a given individual can live out one or many sexual identities. This hypothesis leads us to call into question social classifications from the fields of traditional psychology, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology, which tend to look at one measure at a time for classifying individuals (class, gender, etc.).

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