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

2021 Popular Music Books in Process Series

Posted: November 26th, 2020 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

Call for Presentations

Since June, in response to the Covid-19 crisis, Popular Music Books in Process has presented a weekly online event for music writers and scholars to showcase their new books or books in progress to an engaged and interactive audience. The series is a collaboration between the Journal of Popular Music Studies, the Pop Conference, and IASPM-US.

Read the rest of this entry »


“No one listens to Springsteen anymore. He’s history!”

Posted: November 20th, 2020 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

(Blinded by the Light): Pop-rock Music and 2000s Cinema

– An online symposium –

Université Sorbonne Nouvelle, CREW, EA 4399 (France)
Université Reims Champagne-Ardenne, CIRLEP, EA 4299 (France)
Organisers : Clémentine Tholas & Catherine Girodet

Keynote Speaker: Mark Duffett

(University of Chester, UK) 

  • Dates : 6 -8 pm (Paris Time) on :

Friday 29th January 2021
Friday 5th February 2021
Friday 12th February 2021
Friday 19th February 2021

  • Deadline for submission: 7th December 2020 

Read the rest of this entry »


Perfect Beat Special ‘Riffs’ Issue: COVID-19, Music and the Asia-Pacific

Posted: November 20th, 2020 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

Perfect Beat journal invites contributions to a special edition of short-form ‘Riff’ articles, typically 2000 words, to document the state of music research in the Asia-Pacific region during the COVID-19 pandemic. A Riff is a blind peer-reviewed article that is flexible in format, allowing for a range of novel and creative approaches to scholarly writing, as well as prompt responses to pertinent issues.

Read the rest of this entry »


The Figure of the Musician in the Cinema

Posted: November 16th, 2020 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

Savoirs en Prisme, no 15, 2022, “The Figure of the Musician in the Cinema” 

Edited by: Bénédicte Brémard, Stéphan Etcharry and Julie Michot 

Although pianists (and even organists) left the movie theaters during the silent era, musicians have become a recurrent topic of cinema. One famous example is the first “sound” feature film, The Jazz Singer(Alan Crosland, 1927), whose hero is also an instrumentalist. Background and source music have already been the subject of numerous in-depth studies. This is why Issue 15 of Savoirs en Prisme will focus more specifically on the musician, a figure that can be found in all national cinemas. The character is featured in many recent biopics focusing on jazz, flamenco, variety or pop-rock music (The Doors, Oliver Stone, 1991; Ray, Taylor Hackford, 2005; Camarón, Jaime Chávarri, 2005; La Vie en Rose, Olivier Dahan, 2007; Dalida, a television film by Joyce Buñuel, 2005 and a film by Lisa Azuelos, 2017; Django, Étienne Comar, 2017; Bohemian Rhapsody, Bryan Singer, 2018; Rocketman, Dexter Fletcher, 2019) as well as in older movies depicting the life and work of classical composers (La Symphonie fantastique, Christian-Jaque, 1942; The Music Lovers, Ken Russell, 1969; Mahler, Ken Russell, 1974; Amadeus, Miloš Forman, 1984; Impromptu, James Lapine, 1991; Immortal Beloved, Bernard Rose, 1994).

Read the rest of this entry »


Finnish Yearbook of Ethnomusicology 2021

Posted: November 16th, 2020 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

Etnomusikologian vuosikirja (‘The Yearbook of Ethnomusicology’) is a peer reviewed open access music research journal in Finland. The 33rd volume of the yearbook (2021) will be published as PDF-files on the Open Journal Systems platform (OJS) of the Finnish Society for Ethnomusicology in December 2021. Editors for the journal are PhD Kaj Ahlsved, DSSc Kaarina Kilpiö and MA Viliina Silvonen. The journal has been granted level 1 status in the Publication Forum of the Federation of Finnish Learned Societies. The articles will all be supplied by an individual DOI (Digital Object Identifier) -number.

The yearbook contains research articles. Length of the published articles are 40,000–60,000 characters (about 20–30 A4 standard paper pages). Manuscripts should follow general standards of academic research articles. Detailed guidelines can be found in the yearbook’s internet site. For a smooth editing and publication process, it is important that the authors will follow the journal’s layout guidelines while writing and editing the manuscript.

Read the rest of this entry »


IASPM Online Research Seminar Series

Posted: November 13th, 2020 | Filed under: News | No Comments »

IASPM is launching a new monthly Online Research Seminar Series in December. Many thanks to IASPM Canada and IASPM Journal staff, Dr Mary Fogarty and Dr Melissa Avdeeff for organising the first one. This will feature former IASPM UK & Ireland Chair Dr Matt Brennan. The series of invited guest lectures will run each month hopefully, and will for the first year at least feature a different branch organising the event each month. Please circulate details of the event and the series.

Read the rest of this entry »


Music and the Moving Image Conference XVII

Posted: November 9th, 2020 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

ONLINE Conference at New York University: Thursday, May 27th – Sunday, May 30th

The annual Music and the Moving Image Conference encourages submissions from scholars and practitioners that explore the relationship between the entire universe of moving images (film, television, streaming, video games, and live performances) and that of music and sound through paper presentations. We encourage submissions from multidisciplinary teams that have been pooling their knowledge to solve problems or discover a new perspective regarding music and moving images.

Read the rest of this entry »


Special edition of Popular Music History on the impact of COVID on popular music history and heritage

Posted: November 6th, 2020 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

As the impact of the COVID crisis continues to be felt across the world, it is becoming increasingly apparent that it represents a significant rupture in how music will be experienced, written about and theorised. This special edition of Popular Music History is seeking quick-response contributions of up to 5000 words that explore what COVID will mean for how we write about, research, collect and exhibit popular music’s past. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Historicising COVID: how the dramatic break caused by COVID has given ways of engaging with music that were taken for granted only months ago a sense of ‘pastness’ and what this means for how we write about them
  • The effect of lockdowns and reduced population mobility on institutions such as museums that exhibit or collect music-related materials
  • Changing online practices of documentation of music scenes by participants
  • Methods of documentation of the many online activities that artists have turned to as live gigs have become difficult or impossible, and how a historical understandings of ephemerality and liveness may be affected by new modes of performance necessitated by COVID
  • Ways in which, rather than a significant break from the past, the impact of COVID on music might be part of an ongoing sense of ‘crisis’ in the music industries, and how the historical responses to various crises might inform what happens in the current circumstances
  • Considerations of how music heritage tourism will be impacted, and how practices in this area might be reconfigured
  • What opportunities exist for using the crisis to reflect differently on ‘taken for granted’ aspects of popular music’s past.

Read the rest of this entry »


New Approaches to Music and Sound

Posted: November 4th, 2020 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

Journal of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era
Guest Editors: David Suisman and Rebecca Tinio McKenna
 
If new book series and journal special issues are any indication, over the last decade, there has been a surge of interest in the musical and sonic worlds of the past. Scholars of music, sound studies, disability studies, transnational and postcolonial studies, cultural history, history of the senses, and others have been expanding our historical understanding of soundscapes, music cultures, aurality, acoustics, and other aspects of the work sound does in the world. New scholarship is connecting music and sound with politics and social movements, capitalism and commerce, the formation of racial, gender, and class identity and difference, the history of technology and of natural environments, and more.
 
Read the rest of this entry »


Sonic Engagement: The ethics and aesthetics of community engaged audio practice.

Posted: November 3rd, 2020 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

Call for Chapter Contributions

Please see below for editorial contacts and instructions for initial submissions.

Edited by Sarah Woodland (Faculty of Fine Arts and Music, University of Melbourne, Australia) and Wolfgang Vachon (School of Social and Community Services, Humber Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning, Canada)

Due for publication in early 2022

About the book
This edited collection aims to investigate the use of sound and audio production in community engaged participatory arts practice and research. The popularity of podcast and audio drama, combined with the accessibility and portability of affordable field recording and home studio equipment, makes audio a compelling mode of participatory creative practice. Working in audio enables a flexible approach to participation, where collaborators in sites such as prisons, schools, and community settings, can engage in performance and production in flexible ways, while learning valuable skills and producing satisfying creative outcomes. Audio works also allow projects to reach wider audience (and for longer) than an ephemeral performance event, extending the potential for diverse perspectives to be heard beyond prison walls, across borders, and between different communities and cultures.

Read the rest of this entry »