Practice Research in 21st Century Music

The 21st Century Music Practice Research Network’s 2023 One Day Conference on Saturday 20th May 2023 at the University of West London, St. Mary’s Road, Ealing, London W5 5RF

The C21MP network is relaunching its ‘in-person’ events with a one day conference looking for common themes in pedagogy and practice research in performance, composition, record production, music technology, music business and arts administration.

The format of the conference is slightly unusual in that is inspired by the format of the ‘flipped classroom’:

• Themed panels involve three ‘presenters’ and a discussant / moderator. Presenters must be able to attend in person on Saturday 20th May 2023.
• Each presenter produces a 20 minute video of their presentation in advance of the conference which are available online for attendees (and the public) two weeks in advance. All presenters and moderators must watch all three videos in advance of their ‘in person’ session.
• During the session, each presenter gives a five minute summary / abstract which is followed by 75 minutes of discussion between the four panellists and with audience involvement, led by the discussant / moderator
• Presentations can involve practical demonstration, musical examples and performance but must address a research question and point towards or provide answers / new knowledge

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Instruments, Interfaces, Infrastructures: An Interdisciplinary Conference on Musical Media

Harvard University Department of Music, May 11-13, 2023

Deadline for submissions: Friday, January 13, 2023

We are pleased to announce a three-day conference bringing together researchers and artists from a variety of music-related disciplines for a dialogue on the interconnected themes of instruments, interfaces, and infrastructures.

As evidenced by the rise of “new” organologies, there is growing interest among music scholars in studying instruments as epistemologically loaded objects that encapsulate knowledge of sound and mediate sonic practices. Our conference aims to extend this work into the interdisciplinary zones of interface studies and infrastructure studies. Bridging these discourses, the conference will open space for imagining new theories, methodologies, and practices that scale between different layers of musical media, showing how bodies, tools, and techniques are entwined in a dynamic web of material-semiotic relations.

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Sustainable Futures in Popular Music: The Pandemic and Beyond

MUSICultures Special Issue

MUSICultures solicits articles for publication in a special theme issue: Sustainable Futures in Popular Music: The Pandemic and Beyond, guest edited by Dr. Alexandra Boutros (Wilfrid Laurier University) and Dr. Brian Fauteux (University of Alberta).

Contemporary discourse is fraught with concerns about sustainability as we reckon globally with climate change, resource depletion, and more. How can we think about sustainability in intersection with popular music? Sustainability is often associated with ecological discourse, where concerns about waste and the depletion of natural resources may shape how we understand everything from music festivals and music related travel, to streaming services. However, sustainability is also implicated in the social dimensions of musical life. A discussion about music and sustainability may ask; What is the role of popular music and musicians in the cultural shifts made necessary by climate change? But may equally query how claims of sustainability figure alongside local music production and consumption framed by ephemeral archives and sometimes fragile cultural memories? Labour, venues, teaching and pedagogy, live performance, production and dissemination, capital and funding, and a host of other music related practices, systems, and infrastructures impact the sustainability or unsustainability of music.

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Music for Girls Conference and Popular Music and Society special issue

Music for Girls Conference (University of Sussex, Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, 19-20 June 2023)

The AHRC Music for Girls network is hosting a conference on 19-20 June 2023 that will explore popular music, gender, and knowledge.

In the public imaginary the figure of the popular music expert is nearly always male. So strong is the male expert stereotype that it has been successfully and humorously parodied in popular culture from Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity to the ‘mansplaining’ proprietor of the guitar shop to the sneering judge of the television talent contest. The Music for Girls Conference aims to illuminate ways of listening to and knowing about popular music that have been marginalised in media representations and academic conversations alike. What if, instead of looking at how people who identify as women and girls are sidelined by male-focused popular music sites of knowledge acquisition, we centre the experiences of women and girls as key to ‘knowing’ popular music, unpacking the politics of knowledge, and developing an ordinary but powerful ‘expertise’? We seek a broad range of speakers to explore the intersection of popular music, gender, and knowledge across disciplines, regions, genres, and ways of knowing. We also invite reflections on changes and continuities involving sex and gender within popular music culture and popular music studies.

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Rock Your Body: Bodies in Interaction with Popular Music

Annual Conference of the German Society for Popular Music Studies 2023
September 14-16, 2023,University of Siegen

1. On This Year’s Conference Topic

“I wanna dance with somebody, I wanna feel the heat with somebody” – sung by Whitney Houston (1987)

Music is bound to bodies. We hear and feel it directly, we move along to it, we watch bodies in music videos and on concert stages, we use our bodies to produce sounds or augment them with instruments. In Popular Music Studies, the body-bound nature of music has been addressed since the inception of the research field. This year’s conference would like to continue and update the discussion by exploring bodies in interaction with popular music. For further specification, four focal points are outlined below, which should serve as suggestions or starting points for possible contributions. In addition, the conference is open to further impulses on the topic. Read the rest of this entry »

Dialogues — International Music Research Conference

May 17 to May 21, 2023
Laval University (Québec)
Deadline: January 20, 2023

The academic year 2022-2023 marks the 100th anniversary of the Faculty of Music at Université Laval. For the occasion, the faculty is organizing the Dialogues Conference, which will be held from May 17 to 21, 2023 at Université Laval, located in Quebec City. The conference, hybrid format, will host the principal Canadian research societies in music, teaching and music creation, as well as an international partner:

Canadian Association of Music Libraries (CAML)
International Association for the Study of Popular Music Canada (IASPM-Canada)
Journées internationales de pédagogie instrumentale et vocale (JIRPP)
Observatoire interdisciplinaire de création et de recherche en musique, Université Laval (OICRM-ULaval)
Réseau canadien pour la santé et le bien-être des musiciens (RCSBM)
Canadian Society for Traditional Music (CSTM)
Canadian University Music Society (MusCan)
Société québécoise de recherche en musique (SQRM)

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2023 Annual Meeting of the New Zealand Musicological Society

Music and Liveness
16–18 June, 2023
University of Otago School of Performing Arts

Deadline for proposals: 22 February, 2023

In his 1999 book Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, Philip Auslander deconstructed the binary of live vs. mediatised musicking. As we emerge from the Covid-inflicted doldrums, it seems appropriate to re-examine the concept of liveness in the creative arts, in music in all its forms, and of the NZ Musicological Society itself. Has the mediatisation of Zoom and other synchronous platforms changed our relationship to both live and recorded performance? What does liveness mean now in a pedagogical context?

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Celebrating Please Please Me at 60: An International Beatles Symposium

March 25-26, 2023
Hosted by Liverpool Hope University
School of Creative and Performing Arts
As part of the Angel Field Festival

The Music Team members at Liverpool Hope University are delighted to announce an interdisciplinary, international Beatles symposium that will be held on March 25-26, 2023 at the School of Creative and Performing Arts, located in the heart of Liverpool’s vibrant city centre. This academic symposium is in honour of the 60^th anniversary of the release of Beatles’ debut album, Please Please Me, and will feature a keynote address from Professor Kenneth Womack, one of the world’s leading authorities on the Beatles and their enduring cultural influence.

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Affective Politics and the Policing of the Social Through Popular Music

Special Issue of the Journal of Extreme Anthropology, https://journals.uio.no/JEA
Deadline to submit abstracts, 15th of December

The ‘affective turn’ across the humanities and the social sciences suggests that we pay attention to how affects create subjectivities, build communities and shape new forms of politics in the making (White 2017, Desai-Stephens & Reisnour 2020, Gregg & Seigworth 2010 and Clough & Halley 2007, Goodwin et. al. 2001). In other words, it encourages us to study how affective bodies ‘act and are acted upon’ (Seigworth and Gregg 2010: 1) as people engage with each other and with sensory objects (e.g. musical sounds), politically and socially, within specific contexts. These insights have implications for our understanding of politics, of the social, as well as how we understand social control and the ‘policing’ of the social. Instead of excluding objects from the social and privileging theories modelled on structure and agency (e.g. Giddens 1984, Bourdieu 1984), scholars are now redefining agency as relational (Barad 2003, 2007; Latour 2007, 2013). This has led to new research on how sensory objects, such as sounds and music, shape subjectivities, build communities and instigate politics through affect, within and across, contexts (Bøhler 2017, 2021; Shank 2014; Guilbault 2019; Schiermer 2021a, 2021b; Muniagurria 2018; Duque and Muniagurria 2022; Stover 2017, 2017).

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“Let’s Get it Together”: Gatherings, Club Cultures, Parties, and Beyond

April 27-30, 2023

The Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University will host this year’s in-person Pop Conference. All events, with the exception of a few remotely scheduled activities, will be held at The Clive Davis Institute, 370 Jay Street, Brooklyn, New York.

Call for presentations

Several years of quarantine and social distancing have set ablaze the desire to gather safely in community in the midst of an ongoing pandemic. This year’s convergence compels a reflection on the power of getting together in the past and present while acknowledging the necessity for new ways of congregating.

So, “Let’s get it together!” Let’s get loud, because we need a holiday, a holy day on the dance floor or beyond. Remember when the DJ dropped the beat, the crowd went wild, and you felt the club vibrating as you showed up in your best outfit? Work! Inside, a kaleidoscope of bodies dancing, watching, sweating, kissing, touching. Music transports, envelops, heals, connects, the dance floor (whatever that looks like!) becomes a classroom, where learning to play with gender, perform experimental versions of self is possible. Where being in communion among strangers, friends or lovers compels gatherers to sweat out the tears, bring in the joy, feel the pleasure. “Can you feel it?,” the desire for sacred spaces of communal celebration in a time of flux.

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