Popular Music Ethnographies: Open Call for Riffs Vol 5 Issue 2

Guest Editors: Shane Blackman and Robert McPherson

This special issue of Riffs on Popular Music Ethnographies aims to bring together ethnographic writing from any discipline, theoretical perspective or methodological approach. We welcome submissions from writers from academic and non-academic backgrounds. We also encourage short contributions; these could include written, visual, and musical elements and/or interrogate traditional and experimental forms of communication of ideas and arguments. We also welcome collaborations between writers, poets, musicians, composers and visual artists. In-keeping with the Riffs aim, we hope to include work from a variety of contributors.  See our website for previous publications and journal issues – www.riffsjournal.org

Read the rest of this entry »

Rethinking the Music Business: Music Contexts, Rights, Data and COVID-19

Call for chapters for an edited volume to be submitted to Springer’s Music Business Research Series

Editors
Guy Morrow (University of Melbourne)
Daniel Nordgård (University of Agder)
Peter Tschmuck (University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna)

COVID-19 had, and is having, a global impact on health, communities and the economy. As a result of COVID-19, music festivals, gigs and events were cancelled or postponed across the world. This directly affected the incomes and practices of many artists and the revenue for many entities in the music business. Despite this crisis however, there are pre-existing trends in the music business – the rise of the streaming economy, technological change (virtual and augmented reality, blockchain etc.), new copyright legislation etc. Some of these trends were impacted by the COVID-19 crisis while others were not.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sounds of the Pandemic

International online conference, December 16th, 2020

Scientific Committee:
Università di Firenze, Dipartimento SAGAS
Tempo Reale – Centro di ricerca, produzione e didattica musicale

Maurizio Agamennone | Antonella Dicuonzo | Francesco Giomi | Daniele Palma | Ludovico Peroni | Giulia Sarno

Keynote speakers:
Nicola Di Croce, Università Iuav di Venezia, Dipartimento di Culture del progetto
Makis Solomos, Université Paris 8, Musidanse
Laura Tedeschini Lalli, Università di Roma Tre, Dipartimento di Architettura

The outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic has had a strong impact on the sound of the places we live in, particularly as a consequence of the measures taken to stem the contagion. First of all, the lockdown and the suspension of most activities marking our everyday lives have produced a crucial drop in noise pollution, due to an almost total reduction of traffic: this has caused silence to emerge powerfully in the aural conscience of individuals. In the meanwhile, the lockdown has produced new sonic environments, putting in the foreground new aural experiences and acoustic elements that are usually covered by “noise”: on one hand, these include the case of musical flash mobs taking off in many countries (especially in Italy), and on the other the emergence of animal sounds in urban settings.

Read the rest of this entry »

Popular Music and Philosophy

CFP for contributions to a themed session at the #MPSG21

Convener: José Gálvez, University of Bonn, Department of Musicology/Sound Studies

Conceptual reflection on music has an eminent tradition in western philosophy that can be traced back to Pythagoras. Yet, what emerged as popular music at the end of the nineteenth century has long been ignored, whether in debates regarding musical hermeneutics and phenomenology in the continental tradition or in debates over musical ontology and understanding in analytical philosophy. At best, popular music was a subject of (Adornian) socio-philosophical critique, attacking the standardization, pseudo-individualization and alienation it represented. In recent years, though, an interesting shift has been taking place: popular music is becoming more and more a subject of philosophical theory in its own right. The increasing debates on musical improvisation in jazz and electronic dance music, several critical re-readings of Adorno’s philosophy of music, theories on the disruptive biopolitical implications of popular music in neoliberalism, and approaches to the sonic affective affordances of popular music in the context of new materialism are some important vectors of an emerging awareness of popular music in philosophy.

Read the rest of this entry »

Writing HerStories: Women’s Rock Memoirs (edited collection)

Editors: Cristina Garrigós (National University of Distance Education, UNED, Spain) and Marika Ahonen (University of Turku, Finland).

The last ten years have seen a significant rise in the number of published memoirs by female rock musicians. Patti Smith’s Just Kids (2010) came out in the same year that Kristin Hersch’s Rat Girl (2010) appeared, and others soon followed: Alice Bag’s Violence Girl: East L.A. Rage to Hollywood Stage. A Chicana Punk Story (2011), Kim Gordon’s Girl in a Band (2015), Carrie Brownstein’s Hunger Made Me a Modern Girl (2016), Chrissie Hynde’s Reckless (2016), Michelle Cruz Gonzales’s The Spitboy Rule. Tales of a Xicana in a Female Punk Band (2016), Cosey Fanni Tutti’s Art, Sex, Music (2017), and Viv Albertine’s Clothes, Clothes, Clothes. Music, Music, Music. Boys, Boys, Boys (2016). More recently, there are Debbie Harry’s Face It (2019), Liz Phair’s Horror Stories. A Memoir (2019), and Kathy Valentine’s All I Ever Wanted (2020). These examples – all from the U.S. and the U.K. – suggest that there is a growing interest in, and room for, women’s rock memoirs.

Read the rest of this entry »

Music, Sound, and Trauma: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Location: Online
Date: February 12-14, 2021

Keynote Speaker: Maria Cizmic (University of South Florida), and others TBA

Although trauma has always shaped human lives, discussions of trauma have especially come to the fore in our current moment. From the pandemic’s impacts—including global spikes in domestic violence and adverse impacts on mental health—to the tragedies of systemic racism and police brutality, trauma dominates contemporary conversations for wide swaths of people. Today’s focus on trauma follows a decade of burgeoning attention to the socio-cultural and psychological causes and effects of trauma in popular media and academic scholarship, including music studies. This conference—”Music, Sound, and Trauma: Interdisciplinary Perspectives”— seeks to bring together scholars working in and beyond music and sound studies to address the myriad ways that music and sound historically and contemporaneously not only have helped people process trauma, but also have been implicated in violence resulting in trauma. In addition, we are especially interested in hearing from scholars working with music and sound in pedagogical contexts with a focus on trauma-informed teaching and learning.

Read the rest of this entry »

Riffs Vol 5 Issue 1: Popular music fiction

“Perhaps only imagination, in its full processes, can touch and reach and recognise and embody… There are many other kinds of writing in society, but these now—of past and present and future—are close and urgent, challenging many of us to try both to understand and to attempt them”
— Raymond Williams

“Good prose is like a windowpane”
— George Orwell

Perhaps you have a comic strip that you wrote on issues of representation in the music industry, or a piece of short fiction that considers popular music heritage, work that has not yet found a home. Or maybe your experiences as a musician, a music fan or researcher have provided you with rich characters, begging to be explored through a dialogue or a short story. We invite you to flex your imagination as a tool for analysis and criticism, to find a fictional form for your insights and arguments, and to imagine potential popular music futures (utopian or dystopian) as a means to critique the present.

Read the rest of this entry »