CfP: Born to Be Alive (Ethnomusicology Review)

Call for Papers: Born to Be Alive: Live Music as a Crucial Dimension of 21st Century Popular Music - Special Issue

Submission deadline: October 20, 2020.
Ethnomusicology Review

The objective of this Special Issue is to question the directions this reality will move towards, as well as its impact on musicians, audiences, and the cultural industries. What will happen to musicians, especially those in small bands from peripheral scenes and countries who have to spend hours and hours on the road to get from concert to concert (Ballico & Carter, 2018; Smith & Thwaites, 2018)? What kind of impact will this have on the increasing precariousness of being a career musician, in the blurring between professional and private spheres and how the concept of “choosing poverty” (Threadgold, 2018) may or may not explain the situation many musicians experience? The DIY ethos, which had been at the core of punk, is now a key source of influence and inspiration for other music genres, through the creation of alternative networks of production, performance and consumption (Bennett & Guerra, 2019a, 2019b). Following this, to what extent can the DIY ethos be used as a vehicle for musicians to adapt to this new reality, whether through the reduction in cost of music production or through the monetization of sociability, meaning, through the blurring between personal and professional spheres, the investment in social media as a means of forming contact networks to perform and tour in different countries? And what nefarious effects can this reality have for new players whose contact networks are not well established (Rogers, 2010) and who are in the more alternative aesthetic and artistic spheres? We know music scenes have always had an over-representation of men, based, above all, in the classic dichotomy between private and public spheres. Secondary and backstage tasks are the purview of women, while the performing and producing, the stage, are monopolized by men. That being the case, to what extent does this emphasis on live music reinforce masculinization processes, or does it, on the contrary, serve as a vehicle to undermine them?

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