Posted: December 17th, 2014 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on Journal of Music, Technology and Education
Special issue on Technology and Performance in Popular Music Education
Guest editors: Gareth Dylan Smith and Bryan Powell
Performance in popular music education is an increasingly technologised space. As guitars, drums and microphones are gaining greater acceptance in school music curricula around the world through performance-based pedagogical models, such as the Modern Band curriculum of Little Kids Rock, and Musical Futures’ informal learning approach. Turntablism, music production and rapping have a growing presence in programmes from primary school to graduate level. Songwriting courses, rock camps and international collaborative pop projects sprout up globally in physical spaces and on line, while children and young people write, produce and release multi-media popular music artefacts from their bedrooms and basements. Popular music has always relied on, grown through, and pushed innovation in technology. With students embracing change faster than many teachers can imagine relevant pedagogical approaches, new paradigms of performance are emerging: drummers become musical directors at the helm of a plethora of technologies, bassists play synthesizers as much as guitars, and front-people are masters of Ableton, loop pedals and computerized gloves. As performance and production skill sets thus diversify and converge, so other technologies democratize the music-making landscape.
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Posted: December 14th, 2014 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on Tacet – Sound in the Arts
Sounds of Utopia
Utopia is one of those concepts that haunt the history of ideas as well as the history of artistic practices. This persistence conveys both a contemporary malaise and the need, if not urgency, for the ideas about difference that are shaped in part by the conception and enactment of a utopia, ephemeral and circumstantial though they may be. The history of sound art and experimental music is no exception: in it we find reflections on utopia, understood in terms of space (enclave, island, or heterotopia) or of time (uchronia, heterochrony or projection of a possible future, based on present concerns). But the concept of utopia might present itself firstly as a radical alternative to the dominant musical and artistic forms, or even to the traditional aesthetic categories intended to distinguish among practices according to the media used. This gap is as much a matter of the creative processes used as of the sounds produced, heard, recorded, installed, organized, or improvised, but also of their mediation. In all cases, it seems that utopia comes into play at the heart of the dynamics that nurture experimental sound practices, past and present.
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Posted: December 10th, 2014 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on Edited Anthology on ‘Music in Comedy Television’
Philip Hayward and Liz Giuffre invite expressions of interest in an anthology they are proposing for publication on the theme of Music in Comedy Television.
International scholars interested in genre, television, screen soundtracks, audience studies and/or cross media engagement are invited to pitch potential chapter ideas for the collection.
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