Music & Brands

For the fifth yearbook on music business and music culture research 2021

Edited by: Prof. Dr. Michael Ahlers, Lorenz Grünewald-Schukalla MA, Dr. Anita Jóri, Dr. Holger Schwetter.

Ever since the early formations of a music-based music industry (Tin-Pan-Alley), non music-related companies built and strategically used relationships with music and actors within music culture. At that time mainly cosmetics and tobacco products were promoted by printing sheet music with advertisements. Nowadays the forms in which music and commercial activities of non-music actors are combined have become highly differentiated. At the same time, the market for activities such as sponsoring or advertising has increased in volume.

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Sound / Music / Decoloniality: A Research Colloquium

Maynooth University Arts & Humanities Institute
24-25 March 2020
Keynote Speakers:
Professor Rachel Harris (SOAS)
Dr Thomas Irvine (Southampton)

It is well understood that sound and music operate as media of governance in various historical and contemporary colonial matrices of power. As such, they have been central not only to processes of territorial colonization, but also to cognitive and behavioural colonization. Indeed, efforts to displace or ‘write over’ other soundscapes and to delegitimize and render mute other forms of knowledge production, other aural/musical epistemes, are integral to colonial and imperial processes of epistemicide.

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Critical Perspectives on Music and Society

This book series produces books that present a critical perspective on popular music and the music industry. Two dominant strains of thought exist for the study of popular music. First, many texts in the popular culture tradition celebrate the artists, fans, and cultures that arise from popular music. Second, Music Industry Studies texts give students a “how-to” perspective on making it in the music industry. In both cases, texts rarely address the way that the music industry produces and reproduces power. The purpose of this book series is to provide a platform for authors who explore the social production of music; as such it is broadly interdisciplinary.

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Low End Theories: Understanding Bass Music & Culture

A Joint BFE-RMA Study Day
Victoria Rooms, University of Bristol, Saturday 16 May 2020

Over the last four decades, hip-hop, EDM, and sound system-influenced genres with bass-heavy beats have become staples of global club culture. Digital audio production tools are increasingly mobile and affordable, while low-frequency vibrations diffuse through diverse parts of society, from the UK Deaf Rave movement to 2017’s #grime4corbyn campaign.

The academic literature on bass music and culture, meanwhile, has steadily grown since the turn of the millennium. Authors such as Bradley (2000), Veal (2007), and Henriques (2011) have collectively focused on reggae and dub music, laying an invaluable intellectual foundation for more recent efforts to expand the sounds, issues, theories, and methods that might fall within the frame of bass music studies.

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Transposition. Musique et sciences sociales: No. 10 (2021): “Flops in music”

Transposition. Musique et sciences sociales

Transposition is an interdisciplinary peer-reviewed journal, supported and co-published by the École des hautes études en sciences sociales (EHESS) and the Cité de la musique-Philharmonie de Paris. Transposition considers music and sound research at the intersection of the humanities and social sciences, in particular through the exploration of cross-disciplinary themes. Addressing the significance of music in the understanding of human societies, the journal seeks to examine how societies conceive, establish and stage their musical, sonic and listening practices. Transposition promotes open research, publishing original articles, commentaries and reviews in open access under a Creative Commons license. As member of OpenEdition Journals, Transposition is indexed in the Répertoire International de Littérature Musicale (RILM) and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). For its tenth issue, Transposition will explore the theme of “flops” in music.

Call for papers No. 10 (2021): “Flops in music”
Editors: Sarah Benhaïm and Lambert Dousson Read the rest of this entry »

Folklore, Learning and Literacies: The Annual Conference of the Folklore Society

Friday 24 to Sunday 26 April 2020, London  

Lore is learning: folklore is a body of knowledge and a means of transmission. Vernacular knowledge, and vernacular transmission, each rooted in language.

Languages of sign, symbol and the body confront us daily, some time-honoured, some very new, and how we read them informs how we act, whether to conform, or to rebel. Folklore socialises us into a community of knowledge, but not all communities are generous. Modern media produce myths and reproduce memes, their speed and reach unprecedented. Rumour, misinformation and conspiracy theory have results – from climate-change denial to vaccination scares – which are anything but imaginary.

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Study Day: Methodologies in Researching the Social Impact of Music-Making

Organizer: Department of Music, Iceland University of the Arts
Location:    Skipholt 31, 105 Reykjavík, Iceland.
Date:             March 19^th 2020
Contact:      Dr. Þorbjörg Daphne Hall, [email protected]
Keynote:     Professor Nicola Dibben (University of Sheffield): “Co-creating tools to evaluate the social impacts of music-making: a case study from Colombia.”
Support:     Centre for Research in Music, Iceland University of the Arts

Music’s potential to be a force for social change is well documented in scholarship from music therapy, ethnomusicology, and musicology, for example. This study day aims to consider the various approaches, tools, and methods we use to research the social impacts of music.  With postgraduate and early career researchers in mind, the study day will be a platform to discuss the challenges that can arise working with diverse communities, from the methodological to the ethical and beyond.

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Bob Dylan On Screen

On May 12, 1963, Bob Dylan left the set of the Ed Sullivan Show, incensed the producers rejected his decision to “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues.” This non-circulation of his image through television provided valuable publicity and Dylan would boast of “the song they didn’t let me play on TV.” This incident stands at the beginning of an ambivalent and complicated relationship between Dylan’s persona, as expressed through his words and music, and its dissemination through screen media. This has been an uneven process: the documentary Dont Look Back (1967) is a classic of direct cinema and played an important role in broadcasting Dylan’s image, but its planned follow-up, Eat the Document (1972), went a different direction: Dylan insisted on editing it himself, it showed once on television and vanished into obscurity. The editing alone of his self-directed four-hour film Renaldo and Clara (1978) occupied more than a year of Dylan’s career, which should logically qualify it as a major work. Instead it’s little more than a footnote even for Dylan’s most devoted fans, watched by few and liked by fewer; Martin Scorsese’s repurposing of footage in Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story (2019) may be Renaldo and Clara’s lone legacy. Masked and Anonymous (2003) was scarcely better received. Though it found some admirers, Dylan himself would express disappointment with it in a 2012 interview with Mikal Gilmore, stating that, “When you want to make a film and you’re using outside money, there’s just too many people you have to listen to.” He even joked that they should have hired Cate Blanchett to play his part, Jack Fate.

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Jazz Now!

The seventh Rhythm Changes conference: Jazz Now! will take place at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam (Amsterdam University of the Arts), the Netherlands, from 27 to 30 August 2020. This conference marks the tenth anniversary of the Rhythm Changes project.

Keynote speaker
Lucas Dols (Sounds of Change Foundation: www.soundsofchange.org)

Closing address
Prof. Charles Hersch (Cleveland State University)

Rhythm Changes tenth anniversary panel

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Technology and Change in Music Cultures

The 24th Annual Symposium of Music Scholars in Finland

University of Turku & Åbo Akademi University 18-20.3.2020

The Finnish Society for Ethnomusicology, the Finnish Musicological Society and the departments of musicology at Turku University and Åbo Akademi University in collaboration with the research project ‘The impact of digitalization on minority music’ are pleased to invite researchers with an interest in music to attend the 24th Annual Symposium for Music Scholars in Finland, which will take place on 18-20 March 2020 in Turku.

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