The Business of Live Music

A conference to mark the completion of the AHRC funded project ‘The Promotion of Live Music in the UK–an Historical, Cultural and Institutional Analysis’ – University of Edinburgh, March 31/April 1 2011.

We invite papers on any aspect of the business of live music from any disciplinary perspective.  Themes for discussion include the history of live music, promotion as a business, live music and the state, the value of live music, and the live musical experience.  Papers on any kind of music are welcome, classical or popular, successful or obscure! Presentations will be limited to a maximum of 20 minutes and proposals should be no more than 200 words.

Closing date for proposals: September 1 2010.

For further information please contact Simon Frith ([email protected]) or Martin Cloonan ([email protected]).

Revise: The Art and Science of Contemporary Remix Culture

Dec 2-3, 2010
University of Wollongong http://uow.edu.au , Wollongong, Australia

In a media saturated environment, questions about authoriality and the ownership of cultural content have come to be increasingly urgent. A number of recent, high profile legal cases have highlighted the difficulties involved in adjudicating between different models of ownership and of cultural production. Furthermore, online environments render local, fannish, and ‘amateur’ forms of cultural production (frequently drawing on ‘Big Content’) increasingly visible – sometimes to the apparent detriment of these forms of vernacular creativity.

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Jazz and Race, Past and Present

A conference at The Open University, 11-12 November, 2010

Keynote speaker: Guthrie Ramsey, Professor of Music, University of Pennsylvania and author of Race Music: Black Cultures from Bebop to Hip-Hop (2003).

Emerging at the confluence of diverse streams, the genre we know as jazz was made predominantly by African-Americans for a good deal of its history. Indeed, African-American musicians and critics have often claimed the form as their own, part of their people’s struggle to assert their humanity in the face of a racialised structure of power which would deny it. However, year by year this position grows more difficult to sustain as jazz spreads around the world, and more musicians of other ethnic origins, and who are socially positioned in different ways, enter the field. Often they bring their own distinct musical and cultural resources to bear on the problem of making jazz. Meanwhile, of course, racial oppression persists in western and other societies.

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Watching Jazz: Analysing Jazz Performance on Audiovisual Resources

Conference, 18/19 February 2011, University of Glasgow
Keynote address: John Altman

Jazz historiography has traditionally revolved around sound recordings, with still images, written documents and oral histories employed as complementary sources.

Although this approach has generally been regarded as successful, there is growing awareness among scholars of the problematic nature of such heavy reliance on sound recordings. In particular, it has obscured aspects of the music and the cultural practices surrounding it that are not apparent from sound recordings, and has led to the marginalisation of musicians who did not produce their best work in the recording studio.

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Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism 15: Music

Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism, the journal of ASLE-UK (the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment), explores interdisciplinary interfaces between humans and the natural and built environment. Submissions are invited for our summer 2011 edition which will focus on music.

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