Welcome to The International Association for the Study of Popular Music UK and Ireland Branch

Inaugural IASPM postgraduate conference

Posted: March 13th, 2011 | Filed under: Calls for Papers, IASPM Conferences | 1 Comment »

The inaugural IASPM postgraduate conference at the University of Liverpool invites papers on the stories we tell about popular music. We are interested particularly in illuminating how the intersection of story with study produces a contested space filled with a multitude of views. It is precisely this multitude we find fruitful for investigation.

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Tango : Creation, Identification, Circulation

Posted: March 8th, 2011 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

Colloque international – Paris, 27-28 October 2011
Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS)

This international conference held in Paris will gather together researchers from diverse disciplinary orientations (historical, sociological, anthropological, musicological) working on the tango and its various aspects (music, dance, poetry). This interdisciplinary conference, organized by the Center for Research in Arts and Language (CRAL, EHESS-CNRS) and affiliated with the ANR GLOBALMUS research program, takes place after UNESCO’s official recognition of the tango as international Intangible Cultural Heritage.

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Renew, Reuse, Recycle: From Quotation to Remediation in Art and Popular Music

Posted: March 4th, 2011 | Filed under: News | No Comments »

Saturday 19 March 2011
Location: CRASSH, 17 Mill Lane, Cambridge

A number of prominent scholars have recently shown a renewed interest in the extraordinary degree and variety of intertextuality and recombination characteristic of contemporary popular musics, particularly in relation to the “remediative” potential of digitally-enabled techniques such as sampling and mash-up. The interest has been both in analysing these techniques as practices, and in assessing their aesthetic potential and effects. But musical borrowings have long been a concern for scholars of hip hop, rap and jazz – in the form of versioning – and of Western art music – in the form of quotation and allusion. Although this conference focusses on late twentieth-century and contemporary popular musics as the key site of the re-emergence of a concern with these processes, consideration of this broader historical context enables us to raise new questions: What are the historical continuities in these practices of recycling musical materials? To what extent have evolving technologies – from notated score, to electronic recording, to digital music media – reshaped or extended these aesthetic practices? How do our developing theoretical frameworks and evolving understandings of different musical epochs and genres affect our conception of and reactions to musical borrowings?

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