Popular Music Autobiographies: Rereading Musicians And Their Audiences

CALL FOR CHAPTERS

“POPULAR MUSIC AUTOBIOGRAPHIES: REREADING MUSICIANS AND THEIR AUDIENCES”

This broad, interdisciplinary collection to be published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2024 will consider why popular music autobiography has recently become such a widely-read genre and a significant factor in mediating popular music for its audience.

Texts such as Viv Albertine’s Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys,  Miki Berenyi’s Fingers Crossed, Alex James’ Bit of a Blur, Nile Rodgers’ Le Freak, Gucci Mane’s Autobiography of Gucci Mane, and Bob Dylan’s Chronicles have been critically acclaimed and recorded on various best-seller lists whilst delivering for many fans an apparent insider’s understanding of musicians whose work they are invested in.

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Song Studies: Approaches and Perspectives

Song Studies: Approaches and Perspectives (Amsterdam University Press)

Contributions are invited for an edited collection that introduces “Song Studies” as an emerging, interdisciplinary field of study and practice. More specifically, the book covers different approaches and perspectives to the creative practice and expression of song (e.g., analysing, composing, performing) and inaugurates the newly established series titled “Song Studies”: https://www.aup.nl/en/series/song-studies.

The editors of this volume aim to provide a foundation for Song Studies, with chapters on conceptual frameworks, innovative methodologies, and case studies that foreground the voices of practitioners and performers. In bridging theory and practice, the volume’s principal objective is to delineate the field of Song Studies as an interdisciplinary space where researchers and practitioners from different disciplines, practices, and performance traditions explore song in diverse and complementary ways.

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The Future of Higher Popular Music Education

Codarts Rotterdam, 12 October 2023

The future of Higher Popular Music Education conference is a single day, on campus interdisciplinary conference taking place at Codarts Rotterdam in cooperation with Erasmus University Rotterdam, October 12, 2023.

Forty-five years ago, the inspector of the Dutch Ministry of Education wrote a letter to the Rotterdam conservatory, expressing his deep worries about other genres than classical music entering the university: “Recent press publications about the attention for popular entertainment music within your university gives me serious concerns” This situation has changed substantially. Popular music has found a place within many European Higher Music Education Institutes.

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Musical Creation In The Soundtrack

XV INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM
“Expanding margins: short film and documentary”

November 23-25, 2023 Conde Ansúrez Congress Palace University of Valladolid

Information and registration

Introduction:

The disciplinary development of studies on music and audiovisual languages has had a regular academic meeting point at the International Symposium “The musical creation in the soundtrack”, which reaches its XV edition in 2023.

In recent years, a line of research has been consolidated from the perspective of Ethnomusicology, popular music and oral tradition, with verifiable results through audiovisual productions of documentary and anthropological value. On the other hand, the Spanish film industry has registered a growing recognition of its productions in short story format, which has been the starting point in the careers of filmmakers later consolidated on the national and international scene. For these reasons, based on what has already been established in previous years, our will is to contribute to this shared effort of preserving the vitality of this interdisciplinary domain by expanding its focus of interest. Therefore, in 2023 it is proposed to open the field of action of the symposium to documentaries and short films, perhaps less considered, but equally attractive for musicology.

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The Soundtrack Special Issue: “Screenwriting Sound and Music”

Guest Editors: Pascal Rudolph, Claus Tieber

Sound and music can be found in screenplays throughout cinema history. The editors of this special issue invite papers that illustrate how knowledge as well as creative inspiration can be gained by using screenplays as research objects in film music and sound studies.

This special issue will deal with the many connections between screenwriting and sound/music on theoretical, methodological, and historical levels. We are seeking articles that might cover the following themes (but are not restricted to them): Read the rest of this entry »

Popular Brass Music in the 21st Century

Conference, University of Innsbruck (Austria), Department of Music, October 20–21, 2023
Haus der Musik, Universitätsstrasse 1, 6020 Innsbruck

This conference takes the increasing popularity of brass music in German-speaking regions as a departure point to explore the contemporary aesthetic, stylistic, sociocultural, economic, and political facets of music that gravitates around brass instruments. Hereby, the conference aims to initiate the conceptualization of a newly emerging and adapting musical field from an international perspective.

At a foundational level, the conference asks how the current popularity of brass music in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland (Steinbrecher and Achhorner 2020), as demonstrated by bands such as Fäaschtbänkler, Moop Mama, Viera Blech, LaBrassBanda, or Querbeat, and festivals like Woodstock der Blasmusik and Brass Wiesn Festival, can be grasped and compared to recent developments in other countries. Are there similar trends of increasing popularity, especially among young audiences? And, if so, what are the parallels, resonances, and differences between them?

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How Does “Your” Music Sound? Belonging, Communities, and Identities in Popular Music across Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe

International conference, University of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia, November 9-10, 2023

Over the past three decades, case studies from Central, Eastern, and South-Eastern Europe have enriched the fields of popular music studies, sonic studies, cultural studies, and ethnomusicology, offering insights into the complex entanglements between music practices, industries, and audiences on the one hand, and different aspects of belonging, identification, and community-formation on the other. Analyses of modern local and regional popular-music manifestations such as (turbofolk, Austropop, chalga, manele, tallava, Serbian trapfolk, Bulgarian trap, Slovenian folk pop etc.) provide an invaluable insight into the multitude of music- and soundscapes in the region. They also present a springboard for further inquiry into the mechanisms, impact, and architectures of belonging, identification, and communities in this diverse space, historically marked by a vibrant dynamic of glitches, ruptures, and connections.

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Diversity of Music Heritage

8–9 June 2023, Folk Art Centre, Kaustinen, Finland

Heritage has become an increasingly attractive area of activity, whether in official cultural policies, tourist destinations or academic inquiries. Concerning music, there are numerous heritage sites around the world, as well as the network of Cities of Music, sanctioned by UNESCO. Music features centrally also in global and national listings of intangible cultural heritage.

In music research, there is a growing body of relevant analyses, notably in the fields of ethnomusicology and popular music studies. Consequently, there is arguably a dual focus either on non-European folk and traditional musics with an interest in human and minority rights, or on popular music as a component in the originality of cities and other localities, as well as in their promotion and branding. In both cases heritagisation of music is intertwined with cultural politics, music tourism and exploitation of immaterial property rights, not to mention developing digital innovations or music in the museum, for instance when considering how institutional holdings and responses to music’s cultural and economic value are managed.

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Popular Music and Wellbeing Conference  

St Mary’s University, Twickenham, London
14 and 15 September 2023

Popular music and wellbeing are both common terms in everyday talk, yet each of them escapes straightforward definition. Popular music culture comprises a wide range of practices, spaces, and discursive and material forms. Wellbeing, meanwhile, has become a buzzword for (post-)pandemic times, capable of generating multiple inflections depending on the settings in which it is deployed. There are differences, for example,  within and between notions of, inter-alia, psychological and emotional wellbeing, social and community wellbeing, and the term also has multiple meanings when it is applied across fields such as therapeutic intervention, charity work, social care and public health. As a result, attempts to describe the interrelationships between popular music and wellbeing are bound to be amorphous and contested.  Nonetheless, we believe that exploring connections between the two terms is a potentially timely and valuable pursuit. After all, popular music culture continually seeks to create states of individual and collective joy, ecstasy, transcendence and belonging, as well as spaces in which subjectivities can be composed, transformed and/or radically (re)imagined. As dance music producer Theo Parrish once remarked, ‘people who say that the dancefloor is about losing yourself, that’s the outsider view, the dancefloor is about solidarity’. Moreover, in the last decade the pairing of pop music with clean living has seen the mainstreaming of ‘sober raving’ and ‘conscious clubbing’. On the other hand, popular music also produces widely circulating discourses about the reverse of wellbeing, such as anxiety, alienation, abuse, isolation, depression and self-harm. This two-day conference seeks to approach these and other issues from a plurality of conceptual and methodological angles of vision. Key themes to explore will include but are not limited to:

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