Call for Chapters for Edited Collection on Psychedelic Music

This edited collection aims to bring together academic work on all kinds of psychedelic music, whether rock, folk, electronic or pop and would make an important contribution to an emerging field. For the purpose of this collection psychedelic music is conceptualized broadly: it can be music that imparts feelings of disorientation, temporal distortion, sensory overload or shift in perceptual frame, similar to those experienced with the use of psychoactive substances; music composed for the specific purpose of facilitating altered states; it can also be any music which accompanies and complements psychoactive substance use, whether widely considered psychedelic, or not.

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Augmentation: past, futures, possibilities and pathways

AJIRN4 2020
Augmentation: past, futures, possibilities and pathways 
University of Tasmania (UTAS)
https://www.ajirn.com

Key Note Speaker: (TBC)

Call for papers and performances:

The 2020 Australasian Jazz and Improvisation Research Network will be convened by the University of Tasmania (UTAS)
https://www.utas.edu.au/the-hedberg

Conference Date: 8th – 10th June 2020

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Music in the Age of Streaming – Nordic Perspectives

IASPM-Norden conference 2020
Music in the Age of Streaming – Nordic Perspectives

PITEÅ, SWEDEN, 15–17 JUNE 2020

The IASPM-Norden conference aims to shed light on various aspects of streaming of/in popular music within the Nordic context. Nordic popular music is a dynamic field comprising a great variety of artists, music producers and entrepreneurs on both ends of the cultural spectrum, from commercially successful to less known and underground. More broadly, listening to popular music has become an evermore accessible activity in people’s everyday life, and so have the “streams” of music flowing across many borders – geographical, ideological, socioeconomic, cultural, disciplinary, etc. In addition to the everyday distribution and listening of music through digital networks, we contend specifically that “streaming” may also be used to conceptualize musical cultures beyond the scope of Spotify or other streaming services. That said, even an analysis of a platform like Spotify may benefit from an approach that investigates the deeper currents and flows of its streams, as pursued by Spotify Teardown (Eriksson et al. 2019) recently. With this conference we wish to engage with the many intersections of musical streams and invite papers that highlight the ways in which “streaming” characterize music and musical cultures.

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Not Ready to Make Nice – Power, Threats and Harassments in Popular Music

30. Annual Conference of the Gesellschaft für Popularmusikforschung
Host: Popakademie Baden-Württemberg
Dates: 25. – 27. September 2020

Locations: Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst Mannheim/Popakademie Baden-Württemberg, Mannheim
in cooperation with Leuphana Universität Lüneburg as well as with the Jahrestagung des Bundesverbands Musikunterricht e.V.
Organizers: Michael Ahlers / David-Emil Wickström
Theme: Not Ready to Make Nice – Power, Threats and Harassments in Popular Music

Popular music cultures always reflect current social developments and debates, sometimes even forming a burning glass under which processes and products become even more clearly visible: In the context of the #metoo debates in the film industry, it quickly became clear that, unfortunately, various misconduct and institutional cover-up processes also take place on a regular basis in the music industry and at educational institutions. These processes have arguably existed for decades within the institutional education of prospective musicians and artists worldwide (!) (Lazar 2017; Payne et al. 2018; Knobbe & Möller 2018; Kerst 2019; Bartsch et al. 2019), but also within the global music industry. What is new is that musicians now have courage to speak up, show solidarity and increasingly bring accusations against sexual assaults to the public. One outcome is that in the area of so-called art music, for example, the Maestro cult is being demystified (Johnston 2017).

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The Autoethnography of Composition and the Composition of Autoethnography

Wednesday 17 June 2020, University of Glasgow
CFP: deadline for submissions 28 February 2020

The advent of autoethnography, a form of qualitative social science research that combines an author’s narrative self-reflection with analytical interpretation of the broader contexts in which that individual operates, holds particular significance for the field of music composition (broadly conceived). As a model for creative practice, autoethnography has been adopted by artists and researchers as a means of enfolding critical reflection upon social, cultural, and political identities and contexts into creative process and outcomes. It has similarly proven useful to practice-researchers, who are increasingly expected to produce written narratives to support and explain their musical creations. In particular, the expectation of the Research Excellence Framework (REF) that creative practice outputs will be contextualised through an accompanying commentary signals the importance of establishing scholarly structures appropriate to the discussion of one’s own work, a practice to which autoethnography is well-suited.

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