CfP: Symposium on Sentimental Ballads in Popular Music, Siegen

“You are beautiful, no matter what they say”

Sentimental Ballads in Popular Music

International Symposium

September 13-14, 2023, University of Siegen, Germany

Deadline: 28.02.2023

Getting goosebumps while listening to “I Will Always Love You”, being moved to tears by “Un-Break My Heart”, being carried away by “Beautiful” – the sound of ballads may evoke affective as well as physical responses. Such somatic interactions with popular songs are apparently based on a common ground of cultural production of affect that parallels the cinematic “body genre” of melodrama (Meier 2008).

How are sentimental affects in ballads by, e.g., Whitney Houston, Toni Braxton, and Christina Aguilera produced aesthetically and performatively? How are songs by, for example, Celine Dion, Robbie Williams, or Lana Del Rey contextualized in movies, series, video games, or commercials? How are they visually staged in music videos or live performances? What everyday role can they play for recipients, for example, for mood management via Spotify playlists? Can ballads be political or even used for populist purposes? And to what extent must ballads (and their popularity) also be considered as a means of successful capitalist co-production of feelings and commodities (Illouz 2018)?

Ballads are among the most popular song forms of popular music across genres as their chart success, streaming and click numbers show. The research project “Low Pop” investigates discursive evaluations of sentimental ballads within the Cooperative Research Center 1472 “Transformations of the Popular” at the University of Siegen. With this symposium, we would like to take a multiperspectival look at the song form ballad and thereby also reflect on the discrepancy between its enormous popularity and the low scholarly engagement with the particularly popular.

We would like to invite discussion of such and related questions at the symposium. Contributions from different disciplines and on diverse aspects are welcome. We welcome individual presentations (20 min.; abstract: max. 300 words) as well as panels (individual scheduling up to 90 min.; abstract: max. 300 words per panel contribution + max. 300 words to frame the panel), and alternative formats (e.g. performance lectures). Proposals of the latter should be marked as such.

Please submit an abstract of your proposed paper no later than February 28th, 2023
(11:59pm, CET) via email to: theresa.nink @ uni-siegen.de

Please find more information here.