Legacies and Prospects: The Pasts and Futures of Popular Music

IASPM-Canada Annual Conference
Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM)
May 24-26, 2019

For those interested in the study of popular music, the year 2019 provides a juncture to consider both the future and the past. We are on the threshold of the third decade of the twenty-first century, and can expect new and ongoing shifts in the technology, artistry, business, politics, and mediation of music and popular culture. Historically, this year marks several milestones:

• 20 years since peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing disrupted long-established business models for the distribution and sale of music commodities
• 40 years since the first commercially-released hip hop recording (Sugarhill Gang, “Rapper’s Delight”), a revolutionary new style that continues to define popular music’s present
• 50 years since the Woodstock and Altamont festivals, seen by many as watershed events in the post-war history of popular music.

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Music & Empowerment

For the fourth yearbook of the German Association for Music Business and Music Culture Research (GMM),published in 2020, edited by Prof. Dr. Michael Ahlers, Lorenz Grünewald-Schukalla M.A., Dr. Anita Jóri, Dr. Holger Schwetter.

The German Association for Music Business and Music Culture Research publishes a yearbook which, in addition to its main topic, provides information on the actual state of research on music business and music culture. Music business and music culture research is not conceived as disciplinary research, but rather as a field of research that reacts to problems and new questions in a situational and transdisciplinary manner and at the same time raises them. The focus is on actual problems and questions, as in this case the question of the possibilities and limits of empowerment in popular music.

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Journal of Popular Music History special issue

Popular music curation: material, virtual, professional, amateur, public, private

The Journal of Popular Music History invites contributions to a special issue on popular music curation. Where it was once the almost-exclusive domain of museum and gallery work, the notion of ‘curation’ has become increasingly popularised: from curated Spotify playlists to curated music festivals and curated club nights, to curated box sets and curated fashion collections, this terminological appropriation of what was once a ‘high art’ practice into more mainstream popular music and culture raises a number of interesting questions this special edition aims to examine.

As Atton (2014: 414) writes, ‘A conventional definition of the work of a curator in a museum or art gallery would once have emphasised the fixed contexts within which collections and exhibitions were presented to the public, where meaning was preserved alongside the artefact.’ Yet the deliberate employment of the term ‘curation’ within a more progressively quotidian vernacular obliges of us further critical exploration of what, specifically, is required of and intended by its use. The mediation, manipulation and presentation of a collection of music and/or music-related items as ‘curated’ has evident implications: for instance, a curated collection may be seen as one organised by ‘experts’; it might suggest a more localised, hand-crafted, artisanal, personalised experience (Campbell 2005); or it could imply a more critical, ‘hidden’ or ‘alternative’ popular music narrative, previously untold or overshadowed within more dominant historical or cultural contexts (Leonard 2007). In this sense, exploration of what, how and by whom curation occurs, directly informs understanding of the curated objects and collections themselves.

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MUSICultures: Queer Musicking

MUSICultures solicits articles for publication in a special issue on Queer Musicking, guest edited by Dr. Charity Marsh (University of Regina), Dr. Line Grenier (Université de Montréal), and Dr. Craig Jennex (University of Regina). We also continue to solicit articles on any topic related to our mandate.

In his book Musicking: The Meanings of Performance and Listening, Christopher Small proposes that we perceive music as a verb rather than a noun—an activity rather than a thing—to recognize the necessarily social nature of music performance and participation.

For this special issue, we invite critical scholarship on queer musicking practices in contemporary and historical contexts around the globe. Musicking refers to an encounter, a way that individuals connect with others and become part of a larger collective. Such an act is particularly important for queer individuals, communities, and politics. In a society structured by heteronormativity, patriarchy, white supremacy, and neoliberalism—ideals that usher all of us into normative and limiting modes of relations—does musicking afford collective queer potential?

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2nd Meeting of the European HipHop Studies Network

ELEMENTS BRISTOL, 06-08 June 2019
University of Bristol, UK

Emceeing. DJing. Breaking. Graffiti. Hip-hop is commonly understood to consist of these four elements. The idea of four elements is one of hip-hop culture’s core narrative and most pervasive founding myth since its beginnings in the Bronx in the 1970s. Yet, the idea of four core elements has been highly contested since the beginning of the culture as there is no unified definition of how many elements exist, who defined them, and how they came together. For instance, hip-hop founding father Kool Herc believes that “that there are far more than those [four elements]: the way you walk, the way you talk, the way you look, the way you communicate.” (Chang xi) Likewise, on his album Kristyles, KRS ONE introduces his theory of nine elements which include beatboxing, fashion, knowledge, and entrepreneurialism (“Nine Elements”). On the other hand, researchers such as criminologist Jeffrey Ross also emphasize that “graffiti […] was established long before hip-hop music emerged in the South Bronx, and many of its practitioners do not identify with the music or its subculture at all” (139). While their number is contested, hip-hop’s elements are crucial in understanding the logics, conventions, and values of this fascinating culture in the US and in Europe. They reveal its creative tensions as well as larger notions of authority, authorship, boundary formation, community as well as inclusion and exclusion.

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Island Festivals and Music Tourism

15th International Small Island Cultures Conference (ISIC 15)
July 9 – 13, 2019 – The University of the West Indies, Mona Campus

The University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, the Small Island Cultures Research Initiative and the Sydney Institute of Music (SICRI) and Sound Research, welcome proposals for paper and/or panel presentations from any disciplinary field, as well as from managers and practitioners who are interested in island issues, to the 15th International Small Island Cultures Conference (ISIC 15) – on the theme of “Island Festivals and Music Tourism”.

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Sustainable Sounds: Interrogating The Materials of Music Making Technologies

Date: Saturday 11 May 2019
Venue: St. Cecilia’s Hall Concert Room and Music Museum, University of Edinburgh

The business of musical instrument manufacturing has grown over the last two centuries from a largely home-based craft industry to a globalized mass production industry. The range of materials used to make instruments has also increased: from renewable woods to precious metals, and from plastic to the data and energy consumption of virtual instruments. How has the changing materiality of instruments affected musical culture – economically, aesthetically, and ethically? We invite proposals for a one day conference on musical instruments, sound technologies, materiality, and sustainability. We welcome proposals for individual presentations on any aspects of musical instruments (and other music- and sound-making technologies) relating (but not limited) to the following topics: Read the rest of this entry »

Home of Metal Symposium and Workshop: Music Heritage, People and Place

Friday 13-14th September 2019
Birmingham Centre for Media and Cultural Research
Birmingham City University

1. Call for Papers

PUBLIC SYMPOSIUM

Friday 13th September 2019

This public symposium seeks to bring together researchers, policy makers, heritage and creative workers and musicians.

We welcome contributions from fans and heritage consumers in response to their experience of the Home of Metal exhibitions and events.

Home of Metal (HoM) is a heritage project created and led by the Capsule organization. Launched in 2011, supported by volunteers, building a crowd-sourced archive and curating a range of popular public events in Birmingham and the Black Country, HoM seeks to highlight and celebrate the value of Heavy Metal music and culture and the role in it of founding artists from the English midlands such as Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and Judas Priest. In 2017 the project went international in its reach, exploring metal culture around the world with a particular focus on Black Sabbath. As a result, in 2019 a range of exhibitions and events will take place in ‘celebration of an artform created in Birmingham that maintains significant global reach and influence.’ The value of this approach is indicated by the Wall Street Journal that has described the genre as the real ‘World Music’, that ‘Heavy Metal has become the unlikely soundtrack of globalisation’ (2016).

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Music and Democracy: beyond Metaphors and Idealization

21 June 2019
University of Huddersfield
https://musicdemocracystudydays.wordpress.com

Convened by Igor Contreras Zubillaga (British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Huddersfield) and Robert Adlington (University of Huddersfield)
Keynote speaker: Esteban Buch (CRAL/EHESS, Paris)

Democracy has been an ideal for musicians throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Musicians working in fields including modern composition, jazz, improvisation, orchestral social inclusion projects, and online networked performance have been drawn to democracy as a metaphor and ideal for legitimising their practice. How are we to understand such appeals to the concept of democracy, in the musical field? Although the concept of democracy tends spontaneously to arouse approval and adherence, consideration should be given to the great diversity of uses that have been made of it (and continue to be made nowadays), the multiplicity of forms of democracy, and the historicity of democratic systems. These complex facets of democracy became especially apparent in the political context of transition to democracy after an authoritarian regime, leading to a struggle between different ‘ideas’ of democracy. Therefore, a careful scrutiny of what ‘democratic’ means and a close analysis of the relations being produced, for whom, and why, seem necessary in each particular case.

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Music and Social Movements: A one-day symposium at Northumbria University

30 November 2018

This symposium, funded by the US Embassy and Northumbria University, will bring together academic historians, graduate students, and teachers to examine the role that music played in various oppositional social movements that were active in the post-World War II period in the United States.

Participants will think through how we teach and write about the ways that popular music relates to minority group understanding, political protest, religious identity, and more. Topics for discussion will include Live Aid, feminism, oral history, protest, civil rights, and Childish Gambino’s ‘This is America.’ The event will include an interactive workshop at which participants will discuss how we interrogate and use documents related to music.

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