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

Popular Music and the Anthropocene

Posted: April 29th, 2018 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

Special issue of Popular Music
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/popular-music/article/popular-music-and-the-anthropocene-call-for-articles/2B5F3F43E89DE87FB651F483ECBD4658
François Ribac (University of Burgundy/IRCAM-APM) and Paul Harkins (Edinburgh Napier University)

Many geologists, climatologists, philosophers, historians, sociologists, activists, and Non-Governmental Organisations believe that our planet has now entered into the anthropocene era (Bonneuil & Fressoz 2013). The common idea is that human activities now have a decisive effect on the earth’s ecosystem: the fast and increasing disappearance of a considerable number of plant and animal species, the melting of glaciers and pack ice, rising sea levels, extreme climatic events, and pollution. These phenomena impact on human activities, leading to forced migrations, the pauperisation of entire communities (often those least responsible for climate change), and, ultimately, to major upheavals. The goal of this special issue of Popular Music is to understand how popular music should and can be described, analysed, and transformed in the Anthropocene, considered both as a concept as well as a material process.

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Things Have Changed: Twenty-First-Century Dylan

Posted: April 29th, 2018 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

International Conference at Artois University, Arras, France
Thursday 6th-Friday 7th December 2018

Guest of Honour: Professor Sir Christopher Ricks

Ever since the early 1960s, Bob Dylan has never ceased to evolve. Hiscreativity remains as powerful as ever in the twenty-first century. Hencethe international symposium “Things have changed: Twenty-First-CenturyDylan” will focus primarily on contemporary Dylan. A theorization can bemade based on the work of Edward Saïd or Theodor Adorno (see Essays onMusic, 1993, quoted by Saïd). Said asserts that the late style of the artist is marked by “intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradictions” (E. Saïd, On Late Style: Music and Literature Against the Grain, New York: Pantheon Books, 2006, 7).

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“Twisting my memory, man” – music, memory and memoir

Posted: April 26th, 2018 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

13th & 14th July 2018 – York St John University Campus

We are hosting an innovative two day event examining the ways that popular music is remembered and memorialised both as sonic experience and as cultural activity. Our event combines academic analysis and critical discussion with creative endeavour, performance and informal reminiscence.

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Listening Again to Popular Music as History

Posted: April 26th, 2018 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

Editors: Nicholas Gebhardt and Paul Long
Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research
Birmingham City University

Submissions are invited for a special edition of Popular Music History that aims to listen again to popular music as historical source and to (re) consider the relationship of popular music and historical method.

Rationale

Jeffrey H. Jackson and Stanley C. Pelkey open their collection, Music and History(subtitle ‘Bridging the Disciplines’, 2005) by asking: ‘Why haven’t historians and musicologists been talking to one another?’  They suggest that at the heart of this absence is a problem of communication, concerning the distinct methods, knowledge and skills employed in both disciplines: does one need to be able to read, play or even ‘appreciate’ music for instance in order to make sense of it historically? On the other hand, do musicologists need an understanding of historiography to write histories of music? The issue for scholars in both disciplines is the status of the musical object: how to account for music asmusic, without losing a sense of its historical specificity.   Read the rest of this entry »


Elvis lives in Amsterdam: Manifestations of the imaginary musician

Posted: April 13th, 2018 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

University of Amsterdam, 29 November – 1 December 2018 

Conference convenors: Rutger Helmers and Oliver Seibt

From Marvel’s Kiss comics of the late 1970s to Cate Blanchett and Heath Ledger acting out different facets of Bob Dylan’s public persona in Todd Hayne’s experimental film I’m not there; from continuous assertions that the guy on stage isn’t the real Paul McCartney to YouTube videos showing Nigerian Michael Jackson impersonators; from Hans Sachs, the sixteenth-century Meistersinger, still performing regularly in Wagner’s opera, to a virtual band like Gorillaz; from Adrian Leverkühn’s pact with the devil in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustusto the unsolved mystery of Chet Baker’s defenestration from Amsterdam’s Prins Hendrik Hotel.

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