CFP: 15th IASPM UK and Ireland Biennial Conference: London Calling, London

15th IASPM UK and Ireland Biennial Conference: London Calling

London College of Music, University of West London, 3rd – 5th September 2020

Deadline: 31.01.2020

In 1992, Allan Moore hosted the 2nd IASPM UK & Ireland conference at the Polytechnic of West London. 28 years later the conference returns to the same building – now the University of West London. As one of the key focal points of 20th and 21st century popular music practice, London has not only projected its musical voices all over the world but has also been a hub for incoming influences that have stimulated a rich and vast array of new musical cultures. The 2020 IASPM UK & Ireland conference seeks to use this amazing heritage to provoke discussion about this and many other subjects. In addition, we are aiming to continue the recent trend for weaving popular music practice and music business and management into the IASPM tapestry. And this practice-based specialism harks back to another key figure in the academic world of music, Christopher Small, who also taught in the same building until 1986 and who coined the term musicking.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

Popular music and London

Multiculturalism, race and diaspora

Theatricality and dramaturgy in popular music – from West End musicals to stadium gigs and clubbing.

The virtuoso and the dilettante – how do notions of skill and expertise play out in different musical communities?

Rebellion and commerce – what is ‘the establishment’ and how do artists negotiate between ‘sticking it to the man’ and making money?

The industrial and financial mechanisms of music – from small businesses to multi-nationals.

Analysing popular music – what kinds of conceptual and visual representational tools are relevant to popular music and why?

The pedagogies of popular music practices

Music and technology – from the social construction of technology to schizophonia and virtual reality.

Live music – including festival studies, the working lives of gigging musicians, tour management, the live performance environment and ‘liveness’ itself

Lists, Charts and Anniversaries – from genre and canon formation to the significant anniversaries of the deaths of Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, John Lennon and Ian Curtis: why are these types of data category so important to us?

How do issues of gender, sexuality, race, nationalism, post-colonialism, power relationships etc relate to any of the above themes?



Proposals are invited for:

Individual papers (20 mins + 10 mins for questions) – if, in addition, you wish to submit your proposal for consideration for the Cambridge University Press Elements series 21st Century Music Practice, please visit http://www.c21mp.org/iaspm-2020-cambridge/ or email simon.zagorski-thomas @ uwl.ac.uk for further details.

Lecture recital / multimedia presentation (20 mins + 10 mins for questions)

90 minute Group Sessions based around a topic, person or example of musical practice and involving three or four contributors – if, in addition, you wish to submit your proposal for consideration for the Bloomsbury 21st Century Music Practice book series please visit http://www.c21mp.org/iaspm-2020-bloomsbury/ or email simon.zagorski-thomas@uwl.ac.uk for further details.

Use of our 3-D audio speaker system, ‘silent disco’ headphone system and network audio for researchers who want to explore creative presentation technologies.

Online presentation – before and after the ‘face-to-face’ conference there will be a virtual conference and for a reduced registration fee a blog / vlog submission can be proposed. This will hopefully increase international participation without increasing our carbon footprint. Further details will be announced closer to the time.

Proposals should be sent to iaspmuki2020 @ gmail.com by 31st Jan 2020. In order to facilitate the anonymous peer-review process, please make sure that your proposal conforms to the following formats.

For Group Sessions please include names, affiliations and email addresses of proposer/facilitator and individual contributors, abstract for the session (c.300 words) and abstract for each contribution (c.200 words). Make sure that the names of the proposer and contributors do not appear in the abstracts.

For individual presentations: please include name, affiliation and email address of the presenter, and an abstract of no more than 300 words. Make sure that the name of the presenter does not appear in the abstract.

Participants in the conference will be required to be IASPM members.

Organising committee

Gavin Baker, Mike Exarchos, Daniel Hagan, Tim Hughes, Sara McGuinness, Paul Oliver, Justin Paterson, Liz Pipe, Dan Pratt, Caroline Russell, Simon Zagorski-Thomas

Chair of IASPM UK & Ireland: Sarah Hill

IASPM - The International Association for the Study of Popular Music - http://www.iaspm.org.uk/