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

Popular Music and Musical Notation

Posted: January 8th, 2024 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | Comments Off on Popular Music and Musical Notation

Call for Submissions for a Special Issue of Die Tonkunst: “Popular Music and Musical Notation
edited by Janine Droese and Knut Holtsträter

Popular music is – within and outside of the academic discourse – often associated with immediacy and spontaneous creativity. This might be one reason why the role of musical notation in the production and distribution of popular music has received very little scholarly attention yet. Where the production and planning processes of popular music as well as its distribution are studied, the focus is mainly on analogue and digital audio media.

However, it can be assumed that nearly all genres of popular music – understood here in a very broad sense, including video game music, film music, jazz, “Schlager”, Broadway and Hollywood musical etc. – make use of musical notation. It plays an integral part in the production processes (composing and arranging, rehearsing and performing as well as recording) and sometimes even in distribution. It serves as a tool for self-documentation, for creativity and self-assertion of composers as well as for coordination of groups of performers, among others. A closer look at how musical notation is embedded in the field of popular music not only blurs the boundaries between the spheres of Western art music and popular music; as has been shown by some explorative scholarly studies, we can expect to find musical notation and with it traces of cultural practices that rely on the writing of music even in areas where it might be not expected at all, as, e.g., notated free jazz and music manuscripts in the high-tech rock studio. In recent years, more and more estates of twentieth-century popular music artists have been made accessible for scholarly research by archives and libraries. This makes it easier to evaluate the role of music manuscripts for the field of popular music, and to gain more insight into the ways and contexts in which these manuscripts were produced and used.

Read the rest of this entry »


EUPOP 2024: Borders

Posted: January 8th, 2024 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, Tallinn, Estonia, July 1st – 3rd, 2024.
Deadline: 15th March, 2024

Individual paper and panel contributions are welcomed for the tenth annual international conference of the European Popular Culture Association (EPCA), to be held at Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre, Tallinn, Estonia, July 1st – 3rd, 2024.

With the overarching theme of Borders, EUPOP 2025 will explore European popular culture in all its various forms. This includes, but is by no means limited to, the following topics: European Film (past and present), Television, Music, Costume and Performance, Celebrity, The Body, Fashion, New Media, Popular Literature and Graphic Novels, Queer Studies, Sport, Curation, Digital Culture, the idea of European identity and its relation to popular culture. A special emphasis, this year, will be on topics such as popular culture borders, politics, forms of propaganda and influencing, and methodological framings within cross-disciplinary thinking.

Read the rest of this entry »


Progressive Rock: Beyond Time, Genre, Geography…

Posted: December 21st, 2023 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

The 6th Biennial International Conference of the Progect Network for Studies of Progressive Rock
5-7 SEPTEMBER 2024, The Krzysztof Penderecki Academy of Music in Krakow (POLAND)

The central idea for the Conference would be to combine creatively the two temporal dimensions in which progressive rock can be interpreted today: the past – from its genesis and original definitions through an analysis of the PROG classics to an attempt to read it anew; and the future – from meta-genre fusions to a critical post-progressive current. Hence, we suggest several subjects to be chosen by the participants and specific scopes to be included.

Read the rest of this entry »


Song, Stage and Screen 2024

Posted: December 21st, 2023 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

Renewing/Rethinking/Reviving
June 26-29, 2024
Hosted by The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts

Song, Stage and Screen is back!

This call for participation heralds Song, Stage and Screen’s first return to an in-person gathering since 2019. Song, Stage and Screen XVII will convene at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts in New York City from June 26-29, 2024. This conference will be in-person, free and open to the public. While the pandemic forced the global musical theatre industry to restart itself since our last meeting, issues surrounding reboots, reckonings, and revivals have long beset both the industry and the study of musicals. What resulting implications for musical theatre research have arisen? We encourage submissions that consider how the terms “renewing,” “rethinking,” or “reviving” apply broadly to any aspect of the musical theatre on the page, stage or screen.

Read the rest of this entry »


Openwork

Posted: December 15th, 2023 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

Openwork is a peer-reviewed journal that publishes research into experimental music, art, and scholarship. Interdisciplinary in scope, our journal promotes new modes of interaction between scholars and practitioners whose work critically re-listens through and across boundaries and constraints.

For our second issue, we seek artwork and articles exploring the concepts of ‘pre-’ and ‘post-’, critically engaging with the established and overlooked boundaries of these temporal markers and reimagining conventional histories, materialities, and subjectivities. We are particularly interested in contributions that engage with themes including musical memory, the Global South, temporalities of performance, narratives of pre-/-post digital, and the Anthropocene.

Read the rest of this entry »


Tay Day – Liverpool

Posted: December 15th, 2023 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

June 12, 2024, University of Liverpool
9am–5pm with an evening Tay Day Cabaret
Samuel Murray and Amy Skjerseth, Organisers

On the eve of Taylor Swift’s arrival at Anfield, we invite scholars [including undergrads and postgrads], fans, critics, and musicians to an interdisciplinary exploration of the singer’s many eras. We invite 15-minute presentations on an array of Taylor Swift-focused topics, which include but are not limited to:

  • Music and songwriting
  • Touring
  • Fandom / Swifties
  • Ecological impact
  • Digital platforms and social media
  • Lyrics as literature
  • Music videos
  • Taylor’s versions and rerecording projects
  • Artists and influences
  • Anglophilia
  • Animals
  • Collaborators
  • Fashion

Read the rest of this entry »


Place, Perspective and Popular Music

Posted: December 12th, 2023 | Filed under: Calls for Papers, IASPM Conferences | No Comments »

Venue: International Centre for Music Studies, Newcastle University
Date: 4-6 September 2024
Format: In-person

Theme: Place, Perspective and Popular Music

For this meeting of the UK and Ireland branch of IASPM, we invite colleagues to consider the fruitful relationships between music, place and perspective. Our use of these terms is intended to encourage discussion around how, where and when we situate our work in the broad discipline (and multiple subdisciplines) of popular music studies as we understand it here and now as well as then and there.

Place is physically located, for example in the spaces and places it represents, in the locations it emerges from and travels to, and in the material aspects of live music ‘ecologies’ – relations between venues, transport routes and their polities, the physical spaces in which recorded music is produced – institutional and domestic). Place is also imagined – both backwards (through nostalgia, tradition and memory) and forwards (through planning, urban and rural policies, ‘placemaking’, cultural initiatives).

Read the rest of this entry »


Mapping Music History

Posted: December 12th, 2023 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

University of Aberdeen, 28 March 2024

Maps have long punctuated musicological texts, but only recently have music scholars begun to leverage maps as tools for analysing, organizing, and presenting research. In part inspired by the ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities at large, historical musicologists are now paying greater attention to the geographical contexts in which past performances took place. At the same time – and fuelled by the increasing accessibility of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) software – they can visualize and analyse complicated trends across time and place with greater ease than ever before. These developments in twenty-first-century digital cartography invite questions about musical practices in the context of other, older sorts of maps. For instance, we might ask how the zoning of civic space has regulated performers’ livelihoods, how travel writing has conditioned listening experiences, or how the policing of bodily display made entertainment venues a focus for state surveillance and control. Building on work across a range of disciplines – including but not limited to music and sound studies; art, literary, and theatre histories; urban geography; heritage and tourism; and digital humanities – this symposium seeks to explore the use of maps as objects and methods in music history.

Read the rest of this entry »


New Perspectives on the Musical Analysis of the Voice

Posted: November 30th, 2023 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

International Conference, Université Lumière Lyon 2, Lyon, France, June 20-21, 2024

For a long time, the voice, embodied and fleeting, remained mute for music analysis. The privilege traditionally accorded by musicology and music theory to writing, both as composition and notation, and to instrumental music often relegated the voice in performance to a second-order, non-objectifiable musical dimension. The literature was dominated by pedagogical (singing treatises), physiological or acoustical,[1] philosophical or psychoanalytical considerations. Furthermore, except for certain singular vocal practices—most of which non-European[2]—, this work focused almost exclusively on singing in the Western art music tradition.

Read the rest of this entry »


A Century of Sound: Technology, Culture and Performance

Posted: November 19th, 2023 | Filed under: Calls for Papers | No Comments »

The 8th Global Reggae Conference
+ Sound System Outernational #10
+ UWI 75th Anniversary

The University of the West Indies, Mona Campus
14 – 17th February 2024

From the 1940s to present day, sound systems have rocked the world with word, sound and power. From Kingston’s streets to the world’s biggest festival stages, the Jamaican-born institution of the sound system has deeply influenced the way music is produced, performed, remixed and enjoyed all over the world. The 2024 edition of the Global Reggae Conference celebrates and investigates the culture and technology of Jamaica’s most famous musical instrument.

Read the rest of this entry »