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

David Sanjek (1952-2011)

Posted: November 29th, 2011 | Filed under: Remembrances | No Comments »

This piece on the life and work of David Sanjek was provided to the website by Mark Duffett.

Dave Sanjek

In his lifetime, Professor David Sanjek established himself as a leading international scholar in the burgeoning field of Anglo-American popular music studies. He contributed to the academic discussion of a wide range of topics, including popular music history, copyright law, genre cinema, and popular culture. David’s infectious warmth, compassionate outlook, strategic ability to foster community, scholarly excellence, and experience in the music industry did much to develop the US branch of IASPM. His friend Reebee Garafalo noted that he was the person who “incorporated the US chapter as a tax exempt, non-profit.” On the IASPM-US memorial site, Professor Garafalo added, “Such bureaucratic actions, of course, only begin to scratch the surface of the love and commitment he felt toward IASPM and its members.” David’s final four years, were, however, spent as a global academic based at the University of Salford in England; his untimely passing left a significant legacy on both sides of the Atlantic.

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Journal on the Art of Record Production – Issue #8: Technology, Time and Place

Posted: November 21st, 2011 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

Journal on the Art of Record Production ISSN: 1754-9892

CALL FOR ARTICLES

Issue #8: Technology, Time and Place

The newly reworked Journal on the Art of Record Production invites proposals for Issue #8: Technology, Time and Place. Technologies are central – and essential – to sound and music recording and production processes. Over time, technological change has impacted on roles, working practice[s] and the recording and production workplace. Indeed, notions of time impact on production processes in a multitude of ways. From the macro, e.g. time and economics, time spent in pre-production, time allocated to sessions/ roles, performance time and time signatures, to the micro, e.g. the intricacies of time-based effects processing and the capability of DAWs to manipulate and ‘edit’ time by means including quantization, programming and time-stretching. Over time, the workplace has evolved from a basic, acoustically-treated facility, through church conversions, the ‘Westlake’ studio style and home set-ups, to today’s portable desktop/ laptop-based production centre; the ‘studio’ has undergone immense transformation in little over a century.  Studies of technology and/ or workplace may be chronological, diachronic or synchronic in approach. Research is welcome from sociological, cultural theoretical, scientific, musicological, philosophical and anthropological perspectives.

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

Posted: November 9th, 2011 | Filed under: Calls for Papers, IASPM Conferences | 2 Comments »

Biennial IASPM-UK/Ireland conference
September 5-7, 2012

Media City UK, Salford Quays, Manchester

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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