Author: Nick

CALL FOR PAPERS

Transnational Mediascapes: Sound and Vision in Europe – Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, May 14th-15th, 2013

Deadline for applications: February 28th, 2013 The conference will take place at the Department of Media and Performing Arts, Catholic University of Milan, in association with Ce.R.T.A. – Centro di Ricerca sulla Televisione e gli Audiovisivi and ALMED – Alta Scuola in Media, Comunicazione e Spettacolo.

Media studies have been forced by convergence, digitization and globalization to look beyond the traditional structure of national media systems, histories and habits, and to begin to analyse their phenomena according to a wider, and more complex, point of view. On one side, they have started to reconstruct the global flows of information and entertainment, the basis of a “mainstream culture” that unifies – at least partially – different geographical, political, social and cultural areas. On the other, they have begun to follow media products and trends in their complex paths across various countries and macro-regions, underlining both the differences and the deep similarities in shapes and meanings, in production processes as well as in consumption practices. Especially in the field of television and sound studies, in recent years, some progresses have been made towards a transnational point of view on historical processes and on contemporary developments, both finding shared theories, methodologies, and analytical tools, and identifying useful case studies and histories. The conference will address two main topics in two different daily sessions:

Day 1: Transnational Television: Towards a Comparative TV History
Day 2: Transnational Soundscapes: Sound and the Media in Europe

Day 1

Transnational Television: Towards a Comparative TV History

Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, May 14th, 2013

Following the comparative approach to European television established by recent works as Jonathan Bignell and Andreas Fickers: A European Television History (2008) and Jérôme Bourdon’s Du service public à la télé-réalité. Une histoire culturelle des télévisions européennes (2011), the focus on trans-nationality in television is one of the most compelling and current challenges for TV studies. If the medium is still deeply national in many aspects, in fact, digitization and globalization include TV into wider multi-national exchanges of ideas, formats, programmes, genres, trends, and also viewing practices.

Confirmed keynote speakers: Jérôme Bourdon (Tel Aviv University), John Ellis (Royal Holloway, London), Peppino Ortoleva (University of Turin). There will be also the presentation of the latest issues of View. Journal of European Television History and Culture and Comunicazioni sociali.

Abstracts are invited for contributions to the conference that will seek to compare television histories, genres, trends, production, and distribution practices across different countries and regions, in Europe as well as in the rest of the world, offering a wide approach on methods, theories and case histories.

The topics can include:

• The (im)possibility of a transnational history of television;
• Definitions and methods for the comparative approach;
• Public Service Broadcasting, Commercial TV and Pay TV across different countries;
• Logics of broadcasting in different countries;
• Production practices in different countries;
• Scheduling practices in different countries;
• TV brands in different countries;
• Genre definitions and redefinition in different countries;
• Textual evolutions in different countries;
• Consumption practices in different countries;
• Transnational circulation of TV products;
• Production and consumption macro-areas (i.e. European Community, English-speaking countries);
• Original research findings on single case histories across two or more nations.

Scholars from all areas of TV and media studies are invited to submit proposals for contributions.

Each speaker will have about 20 minutes of speaking time.

Proposals (250 words, written in English, French or Italian), along with short biographical notes and key bibliographical references, are due by February 28th. Submissions should be sent to Attilia Rebosio, dip.scienzecom@unicatt.it

Notifications of acceptance will be sent no later than March 10th.

Day 2

Transnational Soundscapes: Sound and the Media in Europe

Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, May 15th, 2013

In post-WWII Europe, popular culture began to relate to a wide range of mediatized practices, at the centre of which the growing music industry essentially revolutionized the media- and soundscapes we live in. This already convergent network expressed a wider social change towards modernity, mobility, new gender relations, that could also be felt as a generational shift. For us today it seems likely to have been the place for the building of individual and collective life histories, allowing an interpretation in terms of personal and collective memories and cultural heritage.

In order to begin a reconceptualization of such cultural practices, we are in need of more information concerning the historical background, the modes of production and the industrial strategies, the textual and paratextual output and the patterns and ways of consumption that characterized the crucial encounter between audio-visual media and popular music, gathering different methodological perspectives as much as comparing different national or transnational trajectories.

As a consequence, the aim of this symposium is to explore from a comparative perspective, European popular culture in its crucial journey towards mediatization from 1945 to the Seventies, as an exemplary trajectory for its seemingly excessive foregrounding of music and sounds within the national film, radio and television cultures and the transnational mediascape. Topics of papers may include:

• popular music and media industry
• european Media industry vs American media industry
• amplification and high fidelity;
• audiovisual performance and the canonization of popular forms;
• national/transnational pop music and culture;
• popular music in film, radio and television;
• cross-media singers and performers;
• stardom and fandom.

Confirmed keynote speakers are:

Franco Fabbri (University of Turin), Andreas Fickers (Maastricht University), Wolfgang Mühl-Benninhaus (Humboldt Universität Berlin)

Scholars from all areas of media and popular music studies are invited to submit proposals for contributions.

Each speaker will have about 20 minutes of speaking time.

Proposals (max. 250 words, written in English, French or Italian), along with short biographical notes and key bibliographical references, are due by February 28th. Submissions should be sent to Attilia Rebosio, dip.scienzecom@unicatt.it

Notifications of acceptance will be sent no later than March 10th.

Social Spaces of Music AHRC conference, Manchester February 13-14 2013.

Music researchers have increasingly explored music as a social practice in which participants have varying degrees of engagement, seeking to analyse the ‘social spaces’ within which music is produced and consumed.  There are a number of competing conceptions of this ‘space’, including music ‘worlds’, ‘fields’, ‘scenes’ and ‘networks’.

This conference brings into dialogue different approaches to researching music, to consider how different conceptual and methodological approaches help us to explore the social spaces of music; and exploring a diverse range of musical genres/arenas including: folk, post-punk; hip-hop, electronica and post-rock; R&B and calypso; Riot Grrrl and Ladyfest; classical; and Italian opera.

Speakers include: Ruth Finnegan, Omar Lizardo, Andy Bennett, Karim Hammou, Marco Santoro, Sara Cohen, Nick Crossley, Nick Prior, Roberta Comunian, Laurence Brown, Keith Gildart, Tim Edensor, Martin Everett, Siobhan McAndrew, Susan O’Shea, Paul Hepburn, Paul Widdop, Isabelle Darmon, Fay Hield, Wendy Bottero

The conference is generously supported by CRESC and the AHRC ‘Music Communities’ pilot demonstrator project under the Connected Communities programme, AH/J006807/1.

 

PLACES ARE STRICTLY LIMITED SO BOOK YOUR PLACE EARLY BY CLICKING ON THE FOLLOWING LINK:

http://www.cresc.ac.uk/events/the-social-spaces-of-music-networks-worlds-fields-and-scenes

Professor George  McKay  

AHRC Leadership Fellow | Connected Communities Programme

MediaCityUK, University of Salford, Manchester M50 2HE, UK

t: +44 (0) 161 295 2694  |  m: +44 (0)779 1077 074

g.a.mckay@salford.ac.uk | CCM Research Centre

george.mckay.org | connected-communities.org

Here’s a new book for those who psychanalytically inclined: Freud’s Lost Chord: Discovering Jazz in the Resonant Psyche (see http://www.karnacbooks.com/Product.asp?PID=31878&Referrer=Newsletter)

Rethinking Jazz Cultures provides an opportunity to explore a number of critical questions bound up with jazz and the dynamics of culture, from Americanisation to the politics of migration and race, from the impact of globalisation and the hybridisation of musical styles to the creation of social institutions and distinct communities, from jazz’s shifting aesthetic status from popular to canonical “art” music. Jazz continues to play a complex role in the cultural life of nations worldwide, shaping scenes, constructing communities and cultural values; the music feeds into historical narratives that are marked by conflict and contradiction but the role the music plays in everyday life is rarely understood. Whilst jazz has developed in a range of national settings through different influences and interactions, as evidenced in the first Rhythm Changes Conference in Amsterdam 2011, the music is also a transgressor of the idea of nation. “Rethinking Jazz Cultures”, therefore, aims to explore wider issues surrounding identity and inheritance, enabling unique perspectives on how culture is exchanged, adopted and transformed.

Rethinking Jazz Cultures is a three day multi-disciplinary conference that brings together leading researchers in the fields of jazz studies, media and cultural studies, history and American studies. The event will take place at the University of Salford’s prestigious new building at Media City UK, Salford Quays, commencing with a reception on Thursday 11 April 2013. The Conference committee invites papers and panel proposals that feed directly into the Conference theme and is interested in featuring perspectives from a range of international contexts. Although not restricted to specific themes, possible topics could include:

• Jazz, Americanisation and the politics of globalisation
• Sonic cultural identities (African American, the Nordic Tone, South African jazz etc.)
• Jazz cosmopolitanism
• Migration and trans-cultural exchange
• Jazz scenes, contexts and places
• Sub-cultural practices
• Genre boundaries and hybridity
• Trans-national or post-national jazz sounds
• Postcolonial settings for jazz
• Jazz collectives and communities
• Media dissemination and the spread of jazz culture
• Venues, festivals and the dynamics of culture
• Jazz, censorship and political struggle
• Jazz in urban and rural spaces
• Jazz traditions
• Cultural politics of jazz
• Cultural memory and jazz
• Revising jazz history

The Conference committee welcomes individual papers and proposals for panels and roundtable discussions. For individual papers, abstracts of no more than 300 words should be submitted. Panels and roundtable proposals should include a session overview, participant biographies and description of individual contributions. Abstracts and proposals (as well as event queries) should be sent to Professor Tony Whyton ( t.whyton@salford.ac.uk ) by 5 November 2012.

Here’s an interesting one:
Call for Articles – Issue 5: Analyzing and Interpreting Improvised MusicFor further information: http://www.act.uni-bayreuth.de/de/cfa_5/index.html
or http://www.act.uni-bayreuth.de/en/cfa_5/index.html
Also please follow us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Act.ZfMuP

Instant composing, real-time music, current music, free jazz, intuitive music – the genre indications on the part of artists point to a struggle surrounding a volatile subject. The focus of this issue is to present and discuss the scholarly methods for interpreting and analyzing these and similar genres and to identify their possibilities and limitations.

The topics in this area range from procedural questions of methodological and manual problems of transcription and translation from one sign system to another to problems of descriptive language right up to discussion of aesthetic premises, which, consciously or unconsciously, we bring to the subject. Ultimately, it comes down to the question of what subject we are dealing with when we analyze: a musical structure, a sonic result, a concert situation, a performance, a performance in the sense of performance art, a document of social communication, group processes, or the celebration (possibly arising from other contexts) of festival and performance cultures.
We warmly welcome all authors who are interested in the issue to send their articles for consideration. Editorially-supported languages are German, English, French, and Italian.

In addition to scholars from different disciplines we would also like to invite composers, musicians, and artists to express their views through reflections on their own art or the art of others.

The contributions should not exceed 45,000 characters in length (including spaces). The deadline for articles is 15 September 2012. Please send in submissions by e-mail to act@uni-bayreuth.de

I think he’s right on…  <http://www.hathut.com/home.html>

 

Bloom Time for Jazz from Switzerland
by Tom Gsteiger