Music, Circulation, and the Public Sphere

Joint Study Day of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology and the Royal Musical Association
University of Manchester, Friday 11 April 2014

Including invited papers by Byron Dueck (Open University) and Estelle Joubert (Dalhousie University and University of Oxford), this joint BFE/RMA Study Day seeks to bring together researchers to engage in interdisciplinary discussions about the relationship between music, circulation, and the public sphere.

Notions of the public sphere, as laid out by Jürgen Habermas, depict it as a site falling between private lives and governmental authority, where individuals meet to engage in critical, rational debate about public issues. Such discussions occur via face to face meetings as well as through the circulation of media. Historically speaking, these media have tended to be primarily literary but scholars are increasingly turning their attention to the role played by music and sound in the formation of public culture. There have also been a number of attempts to rethink the notion of the public sphere itself, with talk of ‘counterpublics’ (Michael Warner) and ‘intimate publics’ (Lauren Berlant), in addition to various reassessments of the public/private divide. These ideas have been taken up and adapted across analyses of jazz, popular music, the Proms, religious sermons, opera and hymnbooks.

We invite proposals for 20-minute papers that help to develop and broaden these discussions across different historical periods, geographic areas and disciplines.

Themes that papers may address include:

• The role of music in the formation of publics and public practices
• Modes of musical transmission in the public sphere (audio and audio-visual recordings, notation, oral transmission etc.)
• Critical debates about music aesthetics in the public sphere
• Musical rethinking of the private/public divide
• The affective work of music in the public sphere
• The political potential of music in the public sphere
• The involvement of the State in the musical life of the public sphere
• The circulation of digital music online and ‘virtual’ publics

Titles and abstracts of no more than 200 words should be sent to [email protected] by 17 January 2014.

Website: http://musicandthepublicsphere.wordpress.com