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

Christian Congregational Music: Local and Global Perspectives Conference

Posted: September 22nd, 2014 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

Deadline for proposals: 12 December 2014
Conference dates: 4-7 August 2015
Conference website: http://congregationalmusic.org
Venue: Ripon College Cuddesdon, Oxford, United Kingdom

Congregational music-making is a vital and vibrant practice within Christian communities worldwide. It reflects, informs, and articulates convictions and concerns that are irreducibly local even as it flows along global networks. Congregational song can unify communities of faith across geographical and cultural boundaries; however, it can also be used to mark divisions between Christians of different denominations, cultural backgrounds, and social classes, and to negotiate or articulate difference in relation to religious outsiders. We therefore cannot understand the meanings, uses, and influences of congregational music within Christianity without exploring both its local contexts and its translocal, transnational, and global circulation.

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Current Trends in Italian Popular Music Studies

Posted: September 19th, 2014 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

Research Networking Colloquium
March 18-19 2015, University of Hull (UK)

Italian Popular Music Studies in the UK and USA has seen increased interest over recent years, with themed issues of prominent journals Modern Italy and Popular Musicin 2008, PhD projects recently completed and ongoing, and colloquia and workshops organised in 2012 and 2014 by Indiana University. This colloquium aims to bring together colleagues from the UK, Italy, the USA, and beyond, to continue the discussions around the place and prominence of popular music studies within the broader discipline of Italian Studies.

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Special Issue of Popular Music on ‘Music and Alcohol’

Posted: September 17th, 2014 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

Popular Music invites contributions to a Special Issue on Music and Alcohol 

Popular music is littered with songs about alcohol, some condemning it, some celebrating it – ‘The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me)’, ‘Cigarettes and Alcohol’, ‘One Mint Julep’, ‘Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee’, ‘What’s Made Milwaukee Famous (Has Made A Loser Out Of Me)’, ‘I Drink’ and so on.  Each genre has its own repertoire of such songs, and its own take on the pleasures and pain of alcohol. Songs about drinking have featured across time and throughout the world – from ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome to medieval troubadours and broadside ballad peddlers in Europe and across folk traditions in the Americas. But alcohol features in many other guises in popular music. In the UK there was even a genre directly associated with it: Pub rock; and in an earlier era in the US, prohibition and the speakeasy contributed to music’s social history. The drinks industry is a major sponsor of venues and festival, as well as of tours and artists. The laws on alcohol licensing are intimately tied to the regulation and zoning of live music. Meanwhile, those who warn of the dangers of alcohol have campaigned for an end to sponsorship and endorsement by the music industry and its stars. Psychologists have experimented with the relationship between the consumption of booze and music, while artists and others have made claims for the creative powers of drink. And finally, musicians have not just taken inspiration from the bottle, they have become implicated in its manufacture (Elbow are responsible for a beer called Charge and Status Quo for one called Piledriver; Sean ‘P Diddy’ Combs struck a profit share deal with Ciroc Vodka that involves him in developing the brand; a premium Jack Daniels is named in honour of Frank Sinatra; and Sting produces his own wine in Tuscany).

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RMA Study Day: Authorship in Music

Posted: September 16th, 2014 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

Friday 6 March 2015
Faculty of Music, University of Oxford

The question of authorship has been a central concern in poetics and literary theory for a long time and there is a large literature on this topic representing various critical perspectives. However, this sustained and systematic treatment of authorship has yet to be reflected in musicological discourse concerned with the particular conditions of musical practices.

Including an invited paper (‘I tell you what to do: autonomy, control and play in game compositions’) by Professor James Saunders (Head of Centre for Musical Research, Bath Spa University) and musical performances, this study day seeks to address and explore issues surrounding the notion of ‘authorship’ in relation to different kinds of engagement with music across cultures and genres and from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives including musicology, psychology, sociology, philosophy, ethnomusicology, and anthropology,

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