XXI BIANNUAL CONFERENCE
IASPM INTERNATIONAL
JUNE 26 - 30, 2023
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA - TWIN CITIES, MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA, USA

It is not hyperbolic to claim that crisis characterizes the state of the world in the 2020s. The COVID-19 virus still rages across the globe. In many countries, this public health crisis intersects with a crisis of political legitimacy caused by increased polarization and the rise of right-wing populism. The refusal of many to vaccinate themselves against COVID-19 has led to the continuing spread of the disease. Elsewhere, similar dynamics are exacerbated by lack of effective vaccines, little-to-no capacity to make them, and the hesitancy of wealthier countries to distribute vaccines beyond their national borders. An ever smaller number of people control most of the world’s wealth as the gap between the wealthy and the poor has become a seemingly unbridgeable chasm. The ongoing crisis of climate change manifests in many ways: increasingly dangerous storms, displaced populations, out-of-control fires, financial and material devastation, rising sea levels, and more, unfortunately exacerbated by politics and the destructive impact of late capitalism. Wars, civil and otherwise, have also increased the numbers of migrants whose home countries are devastated but who are not welcomed elsewhere, leading to a crisis of the displaced and, with the ongoing conflict in the Ukraine compounding continued struggles in Afghanistan, Israel-Palestine, Syria, and many other regions, heightened tension between global powers that at times evokes the Cold War. The rise of neo-fascism has accompanied the return of dangerous nationalisms that attempt to disenfranchise certain members of society, often by race, gender, and sexuality, while reinforcing existing social and racial constructions. Other crises abound, as white supremacy rises again in North America and Europe, women’s rights are under attack in various repressive regimes across the globe, and we learn of human rights abuses perpetrated during military crises and civil unrest.

Music is often implicated in these crises, and it also has crises of its own in terms of its production, distribution, and consumption - thus the double meaning of the conference theme. Artificial intelligence offers new creative possibilities for music composition and arrangement, but when combined with unbridled capitalism threatens to make musicians obsolete by replacing them with AI-generated musical algorithms or denying them their livelihoods with paltry payouts from streaming services. The ontological status of popular music is indeed under threat, if not already in crisis. Music scenes globally are struggling to recover from COVID-19 restrictions and lockdowns, with continued uncertainty as new variants emerge. But COVID-19 has also reminded us of the importance of music and demonstrated the resilience of musicians. Music has been central to the social movements—both left and right—that have emerged in response to crises such as #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, the effort to defend the safety and personhood of LGBTQIA communities, and the continued fight for Indigenous rights in numerous countries. Music is thus central worldwide to demands for change, to addressing the structural inequities that continue to affect so many communities and disproportionate impacts of the public health crisis, and to provide solace during a time when many individuals have experienced heightened mental and physical health challenges. Conversely, popular music is also deployed skillfully by the movements and power structures that oppose and stifle these efforts. This conference will explore how popular music shapes and has been shaped by these ongoing global crises.

The twenty-second International Association for the Study of Popular Music conference, which will also serve as the annual meeting of IASPM-US, will address the theme of popular music’s role within various sites of crisis, from the most global to the most individual levels, historically and in the present-day.

For further details visit the conference website here.

The Prisons of Note project will be featured in a workshop at the 2023 EPEA Conference in Tønsberg, Norway.

For more details about the conference and see the programme, visit the conference website.

The Prisons of Note team are participating in the two ‘Radio Relations: Care, Labour, Knowledge’ panels at the NECS (European Network for Cinema & Media Studies) Conference hosted by the University of Oslo’s Media Department. The Radio Relations panel presenters and chairs are:

Radio Relations: Care, Labour, Knowledge #1
Chair: Alejandra Bronfman (University at Albany, SUNY)

Participants:
Owen Chapman (Concordia University) - Encountering Relations: Listening to Very Low Frequency Radio

Ieva Gudaitytė (University of Oslo) - On Hosting and Being Hosted: Care in Community Music Radio Practice and Research

Áine Mangaoang (University of Oslo) - RøverRadion: Prison Radio, Nordic Exceptionalism, and Creating Citizenship

Matteo Spanò (UdK, Berlin University of the Arts) - Weaving Voices: New Perspectives on Radio and Vocal Expression

Radio Relations: Care, Labour, Knowledge #2

Chair: Kyle Devine (University of Oslo)

Participants:
Carolyn Birdsall (University of Amsterdam) - Inventing the Radio Archive: Neglect, Love, and Care Practices within Radio Preservation

Lucy Cathcart (University of Oslo) - Distant Voices: Sounding Care in Carceral Spaces through Collaborative Songwriting and Podcast Production

Alejandra Bronfman (University at Albany, SUNY) - Healing? Radio’s Post-Military Soundscapes

For more, check out the conference website here.

In 2022, the American Musicological Society (AMS), Society for Ethnomusicology (SEM), and Society for Music Theory (SMT) will hold their annual meetings jointly on 10-13 November 2022 at the Hilton New Orleans Riverside. With upwards of 3000 attendees, it will be the largest scholarly music event in years and will feature hundreds of papers, workshops, roundtables, lectures and performances.

For more info, visit the conference website here.

IASPM UK & Ireland Biennial Conference

31 August – 2 September 2022

Hosted by the University of Liverpool, the theme of this IASPM UK/Ireland Biennial Conference is Challenge and Change in Popular Music.

Organising committee

IASPM UK/Ireland: Simon Zagorski-Thomas

University of Liverpool: Catherine Tackley, Sara Cohen, Kenneth Smith, Freya Jarman, Marion Leonard, Simran Singh

The conference has been supported by:

The Department of Music, University of Liverpool
The Institute of Popular Music, University of Liverpool

Register here!

Contact the conference team at:

• iaspm@Liverpool.ac.uk

For more information, visit here.

Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship within Popular Music and Criminology

Job description

A two-year post-doctoral research fellowship in Music, Criminology and Social Justice is available at the Department of Musicology (IMV), University of Oslo.

The position is affiliated with the research project PRISONS OF NOTE: Mapping music and nuances in penal exceptionalism from the periphery, funded by the Research Council of Norway. The successful candidate will work as part of a team led by Principal Investigator Áine Mangaoang, alongside research assistants and an international scientific advisory board. We seek candidates whose work intersects with at least one of the specialised areas of the PRISONS OF NOTE project as well as its broader themes. The post-doctoral fellow is expected to publish independently and in collaboration with the PRISONS OF NOTE team, to present research papers at international conferences, and contribute to wider public communication of the research results.

More about the position

The PRISONS OF NOTE project investigates the experiences of, circumstances surrounding, and approaches to music and imprisonment in the lives of prisoners, staff, and stakeholders. It will examine the relationship between prison music – which includes music education, music therapy, music-making and listening initiatives – and the sociocultural, political, ethical and aesthetic implications of this creative practice from multiple perspectives. Using an international, comparative approach grounded in empirical research, PRISONS OF NOTE maps the nuances and asymmetries in penal exceptionalism from the smaller, peripheral jurisdictions of Norway, Iceland and the Republic of Ireland, to untangle the ways music is used – and is useful – in prison. 

PRISONS OF NOTE builds on recent scholarship from musicology and comparative penology, drawing from models of prison ethnography, sociology and ethnomusicology to compare prison music experiences in smaller jurisdictions of penal exceptionalism – places that have been largely overlooked in comparative criminological and musicological discourse. The project collects qualitative data from prison case studies across three countries in order to contribute new, interdisciplinary knowledge on how music is used and is useful in prisons from a peripheral perspective, and changing how we study music and imprisonment – from isolated, single-nation case studies to connected, transcultural experiences that transcend national borders.

The Postdoctoral Research Fellow will be a central member of the project team and a core contributor to Work Package 2: Supporting Music in Prisons: Prison Staff, Music Facilitators & Prison Stakeholders’ Perspectives. The aim is to provide the first nuanced and detailed understanding of the multifaceted levels of gatekeeping and politics involved in planning, delivering, facilitating, and sustaining prison music initiatives across a range of contexts (for e.g. in high, medium and open prisons, in different national milieus with varying political and economic backgrounds). The applicant is expected to detail their planned approach and methods for this research in their project description, which must be submitted as a part of the application.

The successful candidate is expected to become part of the research milieu at the Department of Musicology and participate in its working environment and development. The candidate is expected to live in the vicinity of Oslo, Norway.

The appointment is for a duration of two years. The post is available from January 1st 2023 (candidates must take up the post by May 1st 2023). There might be a possibility to extend to three years depending on the qualifications of the recruited candidate, the departments’ needs for teaching, and the departments need for assistance.

Qualification requirements

• PhD within an area with relevance to the planned postdoctoral work, for instance within musicology, ethnomusicology, popular music studies, community music, criminology, sociology, or other fields that can be demonstrated to offer a solid foundation for the project.

• The doctoral dissertation must have been submitted for evaluation before the application deadline.

• The candidate’s research project must be closely connected to and relevant for the PRISONS OF NOTE project

• Fluent oral and written communication skills in English

• Personal suitability and motivation for the position.

In assessing the applications, special emphasis will be placed on:

• The proposed research project's scientific merit, research-related relevance and closely-connected to the central themes of the PRISONS OF NOTE project.

• The applicant's track-record, potential, and personal ability to complete their research project within the stipulated time and contribute actively to the PRISONS OF NOTE project.

• Knowledge and interest in the theories and methods used in the PRISONS OF NOTE project.

• Good collaboration skills and the ability to join and contribute to the Department’s research environment and interdisciplinary academic communities.

• Research ambition such as demonstrated through academic publications and conference presentations is advantageous, but not a requirement.

• Storng communication skills in a Scandinavian/Nordic language is also advantageous, but not a requirement.

Appointment is dependent on the public defence of the doctoral thesis being approved.

We offer

• Salary NOK 544 400 – 626 300 per year, depending on qualifications

• A professionally stimulating working environment

• Attractive welfare benefits

• Membership in the Norwegian Public Service Pension Fund

Deadline: 16th September 2022

For more information and to apply for the position, visit the full ad on Jobbnorge.no here.

Mangaoang, Áine (2021). “A reward rather than a right”: Facilitators’ perspectives on the place of music in Norwegian prison exceptionalism. Musicae Scientiae. Vol. 25(3) 274–289.

Abstract

Scholarship on prison music-making projects and programmes to date has largely overlooked the perspectives of prison music facilitators, who form an integral part of many prison music activities. The aim of the study, which was exploratory in nature, was to contribute to a better understanding overall of the relationship between music and imprisonment by focusing on the perspectives of prison music practitioners. Drawing from data collected in four Norwegian prisons through ethnographic research, data was analysed thematically with four key themes emerging: interpersonal communication and emotional connection; social responsibility; prison system and environment, and (in)difference and exclusion. The findings highlight the fact that the range of prison music activities offered in many Norwegian prisons affects music facilitators deeply in a number of ways, and support existing studies that find that prison music practices can contribute to creating a community of caring individuals both inside and outside prisons. Notably, the emergence of the (in)difference and exclusion theme demonstrates a more critical and nuanced view of prison music facilitators’ experiences as going beyond simplistic, romantic notions of music’s function in social transformation. Concerns raised for those who appear to be excluded or differentiated from music-making opportunities in prison – in particular foreign nationals and women – suggest that (even) in the Norwegian context, music in prisons remains a “reward” rather than a fundamental “right.” This study marks a step towards a richer and more critical understanding of prison musicking and aims to inform future research, practice, and the processes involved in the possibilities for offering music in prisons.

Keywords music making, prison arts, music facilitators, thematic analysis, prison, Norway, Scandinavian exceptionalism

The article is published Open Access and available to read/download for free here.

Book Review, Irish Studies Review, Volume 29, 2021 - Issue 4

Made in Ireland: studies in popular music. Edited by Áine Mangaoang, John O’Flynn and Lonán Ó Briain, New York and London, Routledge, 2020, 280 pp., £27.99 (paperback), ISBN 9781138336032

Lauren Alex O’Hagan

Pages 542-544 | Published online: 20 Sep 2021

https://doi.org/10.1080/09670882.2021.1982821

In 2017, journalist David Forsythe posed the question “what have the Irish ever done for us?” As he went on to demonstrate through his stories of Irish people who have made their mark in the fields of science and engineering, quite a lot! And that is undoubtedly the case too when it comes to music, as Mangaoang, O’Flynn and Ó Briain so expertly demonstrate in Made in Ireland.

Bringing together a range of interdisciplinary scholars, Made in Ireland is the first dedicated collection of essays on Irish popular music from the post-WW2 period to the present day. As the editors state in the book’s introduction, the “assumed musicality” of the Irish has often hindered the “recognition and status of domestic popular music-making” and downplayed “individual agency and particular (sub-)scenes and local networks” (10). Made in Ireland firmly addresses these points with its all-encompassing focus on the “reproduction, appropriation and development of global musical-cultural movements and phenomena in local and national contexts” (3), as well as the “hybridities and other points of intersection” (3) between international music genres and traditional Irish music practices. This makes it an up-to-date, comprehensive and inclusive volume that injects dynamism into the growing area of Irish musicology and offers new approaches, understandings and theoretical paradigms onto the activities and perspectives of domestic music producers, mediators, distributors and consumers on the island of Ireland, as well as aspects of performance and reception that spread to Britain and other Anglophone countries through the Irish diaspora.

The book consists of 17 core chapters, organised into three thematic areas rather than chronologically – Music Industries and Historiographies (Part 1), Roots and Routes (Part 2) and Scenes and Networks (Part 3) – followed by a coda from cultural historian Gerry Smyth and an afterword featuring an interview with Neil Hannon of The Divine Comedy. Part 1 provides a thorough overview of the close entwinement of Irish popular music with the economic, political and social contexts of life on the island, while Part 2 delves into the locations, directions and articulations of domestic genres and practices in historical and contemporary contexts. Part 3 focuses on popular musical scenes and networks in early 21st-century Ireland, with a particular emphasis on the impact of digitalisation and globalisation on local music-making, styles and genres. This structure is refreshingly clear and engaging, enabling salient topics – Irishness, (trans)locality, sociomusical spaces and places, rebellion/resistance – to build dialectically across chapters in ways that foreground the relationship between Irish popular music, geospatial context and cultural identity.

In the coda, Smyth makes the important point that contemporary studies of Irish popular music must “strive towards intersectionality” and break down the preconceived dichotomies between “Irish and Northern Irish, Gaelic and Anglo, urban and rural, working-class and middle-class identities” (248). This ability to challenge boundaries and recognise a type of hybrid, malleable and polysemic Irishness is a key strength of Made in Ireland, expanding the field considerably by breaking with the “Celtic Tiger” stereotype of what being Irish should be and, instead, demonstrating its complexities and multifacetedness. We see engagement with race in J. Griffith Rollefson’s essay on Irish rap and Laura Watson’s discussion of memoirs on Thin Lizzy frontman Phil Lynott, while sexuality is addressed in Ann-Marie Hanlon’s study of the lesbian electro-pop duo Zrazy. Womanhood – an often-overlooked area of Irish musicology – is also adeptly covered in Aileen Dillane’s analysis of the life and career of Sinéad O’Connor and Noel McLaughlin and Joanna Braniff’s account of pioneering blues singer Ottilie Patterson.

Made in Ireland is also to be praised for its attention to traditional Irish music and cultural practices and their continued importance in contemporary society. Tríona Ní Shíocháin’s essay offers an insightful look into how Irish-language songs perform the “post-colonial self” and create “new emergent Irish identities” (109), while Adrian Scahill expands Peterson and Kern’s concept of the “cultural omnivore” to explore how post-revival traditional music is dissolving the boundaries with popular music. Similar themes are at work in Síle Denvir’s chapter on the evolution of gaelcheol tíre and its role in Connemara’s musical landscape and John O’Flynn’s essay on the articulations of otherness in mediations of Irish popular music. The enduring influence of Ireland’s storytelling tradition is also a key theme in the aforementioned chapters on rock memoirs and Irish rap.

The way in which Ireland’s troubled history has helped shape the island’s unique music scene is another important focal point of Made in Ireland. This is excellently demonstrated in Timothy A. Heron’s essay on the Northern Irish punk scene, Stephen R. Miller’s work on Irish rebel songs and Ciarán Ryan’s study of Irish fanzines. All three authors show how music can be used to showcase rebellion or resistance, yet at the same time, create solidarity between diverse communities and act as conduits to develop one’s own identity.

Another core aspect that distinguishes the Irish music scene from others is the centrality of place and space. This is skilfully addressed by both Jaime Jones and Eileen Hogan in their studies of the significance of “local” for understanding community in the Dublin and Cork music scenes, respectively, as well as by Caroline Ann O’Sullivan in her exploration of how music in Dublin has changed as a result of new technology. Hogan’s concept of “parochial capital” (185) is particularly thought-provoking and provides a useful way of thinking about the significance of place attachment in local music scenes. We also see the strong interconnection between the local, translocal and international in Michael Mary Murphy’s essay on Irish record labels and Helen Gubbins and Lonán Ó Briain’s study of RTÉ Radio 2’s Fanning Sessions.

There is very little to critique about Made in Ireland as the editors have done an exceptional job of offering a comprehensive and thorough overview of Irish popular music, ensuring that a diverse range of artists, styles and social contexts are addressed. One area that could perhaps have been better developed, however, is the role of fans. While this is touched on in Ryan’s essay on fanzines, the opportunities for participatory fandom offered by social media channels like YouTube and Facebook (cf. O’Hagan 2021) may have further enriched some of the arguments in the book around hybrid Irishness and (trans)locality. Likewise, a greater emphasis on material culture – whether album artwork, clothing or instruments – could have provided new perspectives on the way that Irishness is articulated and Irish music networks interweave and expand beyond local contexts while remaining grounded in them.

Overall, I would like to highly recommend Made in Ireland for its fresh and valuable insights into the development of Irish popular music over the past eighty years. Its content will appeal particularly to scholars of music, cultural studies and history and has the potential to open up new discussions, approaches and areas of research in Irish musicology. However, the book’s accessible style also makes it suitable for anybody with a general interest in Irish popular music. The editors are to be commended for producing an outstanding volume that clearly demonstrates that popular music is a fundamental part of Irish cultural heritage and a key resource for the articulation of being Irish in the modern world.

Bibliography

1. Forsythe, David. What Have the Irish Ever Done for Us? Dublin: Currach Books, 2017. [Google Scholar]

2. O’Hagan, Lauren Alex. “Rory Played the Greens, Not the Blues.” Expressions of Irishness of the Rory Gallagher YouTube Channel.” Irish Studies Review 29, no. 3 (2021): 348–369. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/09670882.2021.1946919. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]

The next jointly held annual postgraduate conference of the Society for Musicology in Ireland and the Irish National Committee of the International Council for Traditional Music will take place on 14-15 January 2022, and will be hosted by Dublin City University.

A call for papers has now been issued: download it here. The deadline for the submission of proposals is Monday 29 November 2021.

Further updates about the conference (its programme, details of registration, etc.) will be posted on this webpage in due course.

The conference committee warmly invites postgraduate students working in all areas of musical research to submit proposals for 20-minute papers or 30-minute lecture recitals. Poster presentations are also welcome. Areas of research include, but are not limited to, historical musicology, ethnomusicology, music theory and analysis, music technology, music pedagogy, popular music studies, musical practice as research, psychology of music, and music and gender. Master’s students are encouraged to submit proposals for 10-minute papers.

The 2022 conference will feature a keynote address from Dr Áine Mangaoang (University of Oslo) and the presentation of the biennial Alison Dunlop Graduate Prize. As with previous SMI/ICTM-IE postgraduate conferences, the programme will also include a Careers Forum and a dedicated session featuring prizewinners of the annual CHMHE competition for undergraduate dissertations.

Restrictions permitting, the conference committee is planning for a blended format across the two days. Friday 14th will feature both in-person and virtual sessions. Saturday 15th will be held solely in-person at Dublin City University.

As this is the first campus-based conference for ICTM Ireland and the SMI since early 2020, participants based in Ireland and Northern Ireland are encouraged to attend in person, as far as is safe and possible. For participants who wish to present but cannot travel there will be the option to present via Zoom.

4th SIMM-seminar (on research on music in detention)

The 4th SIMM research seminar is organized by the CIPEM/INET-md (Centro de Investigação em Psicologia da Música e Educação Musical) and the research platform SIMM and is focussing on research on music programmes in detention. The seminar is planned to take place from 6th until 9th December 2021 at CIPEM in Porto, Portugal.

This research-seminar will welcome a small group of 20 post-graduate students and early-career researchers – who are all involved in ongoing research on the possible role of music in detention – to spend a 4-day seminar during which they will share their research experiences with eachother.

The following facilitators will help the sharing of experiences and ideas and research methodologies: Mary Cohen, Ailbhe Kenny, Inês Lamela and Graça Mota, and assisted by Lukas Pairon.

At the end of the 4-day seminar there will be a public moment with a keynote given by Mary Cohen.

The scientific committee for this seminar is composed of: Brydie-Leigh Bartleet, Graça Boal Palheiros, Mary Cohen, Jorge Alexandre Costa, Ailbhe Kenny, Ines Lamela, Graça Mota and Lukas Pairon.

During the 10th episode of the SIMM-podcast we interviewed the Porto-seminar facilitators Ailbhe Kenny, Ines Lamela and Graça Mota, as well as researcher Aine Mangaoang. And you can hear an interview with Mary Cohen during the 3rd episode of the SIMM-podcast. Listening to these podcast-episodes will give you an idea of what the seminar in Porto can be about.

Episode 5: Made in Ireland

September 2021

In October 2020 Routledge published, Made in Ireland: Studies in Popular Music, this is part of Routledge’s global popular music series which, as they put it, is ‘devoted to popular music largely unknown to Anglo-American readers’. This collection of essays, through a wide range of historical and critical vantage points, explores popular music on the island of Ireland. Made in Ireland is edited by Áine Mangaoang, John O’Flynn and Lonán Ó Briain and in this episode Lines on Music speaks to Áine and John about the collection and about the process of putting it together. We also discuss several of the chapters, we speak about Áine and John’s contributions to the collection and about some possible future trajectories of research on Irish popular music. !is episode is part one of two.

In the following episode we speak to Tríona Ní Shíocháin about her contribution to the collection, “!e Politics of Sound: Modernity and Post-Colonial Identity in Irish-Language Popular Song”, so stay tuned for that.

To listen to episode #5 “Made in Ireland” on Apple Podcast, visit here.

For the episode’s shownotes, visit here.

Lines on Music

By Jeremiah Spillane

Lines on Music is a musicology podcast featuring conversations on the study and performance of music. While the primary focus of this podcast will be on the academic study of jazz and popular music the intention is to really keep things quite open, and there are some exciting episodes planned for the months ahead… stay tuned.

In this 10th SIMM-podcast episode Lukas Pairon interviews Inês Lamela and Graça Mota  from Portugal, Áine Mangaoang from Ireland who is now living and working in Norway, and Ailbhe Kenny from Ireland. We discuss with them about research on music programmes in detention.

One previous episode of the SIMM-podcast already treated these topics: In the 3rd episode we interviewed John Speyer, Mary Cohen and André de Quadros. 

This subject was also discussed during two sessions at the 5th SIMM-posium with the Brussels-based Bozar (on 26th January and on 2nd February 2021) of which recordings can be found on the website of SIMM.  

The reason why we propose another podcast-episode on this topic is this: During this year’s 4th SIMM-seminar from 6 to 9th December at the Porto University College CIPEM, we will during 4 days bring together a small group of up to 20 scholars doing research on music programmes in detention. Experienced facilitators will allow the participants to share their research experiences, ideas and methodologies. 3 of those facilitators are being interviewed during this podcast episode: Graça Mota, Ines Lamela and Ailbhe Kenny.

Referenced during this podcast-episode: Casa da Musica Porto, CIPEM, Mary Cohen, SIMM-issue of Musicae Scientiae, SIMM-seminar #4 Porto, Mariusz Radwanski, Rite of Spring in Portuguese Prison

contact: info@simm-platform.eu / www.simm-platform.eu

Above text from: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1424293/8625143-simm-podcast-10

Listen to the episode for free on:

Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/podcast/id1546545668

Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/5R9F5AEIvaKg5o5Je6CU6H

My review of Noel McLaughlin and Joanna Braniff’s book How Belfast Got the Blues: A Cultural History of Popular Music in the 1960s (Intellect, 2020) is out now in Issue 16 of Estudios Irlandeses. Read the review for free here.

Citation:

Mangaoang, Áine (2021). Review of How Belfast Got the Blues: A Cultural History of Popular Music in the 1960s. Noel McLaughlin and Joanna Braniff. Estudios Irlandeses. ISSN 1699-311X. 16, s 298- 301 . doi: https://doi.org/10.24162/EI2021-10084

Áine Mangaoang’s book Dangerous Mediations: Pop Music in a Philippine Prison Video is now available in paperback!

Published by Bloomsbury Academic (New York), part of the Bloomsbury Series: New Approaches to Sound, Music, and Media

Order directly from Bloomsbury and avail of a 35% DISCOUNT using the CODE: GLR MP8 at checkout

About the book:

In 2007, an unlikely troupe of 1500 Filipino prisoners became Internet celebrities after their YouTube video of Michael Jackson's ground-breaking hit 'Thriller' went viral. Taking this spectacular dance as a point of departure, Dangerous Mediations explores the disquieting development of prisoners performing punishment to a global, online audience. Combining analysis of this YouTube video with first-hand experiences from fieldwork in the Philippine prison, Áine Mangaoang investigates a wide range of interlocking contexts surrounding this user-generated text to reveal how places of punishment can be transformed into spaces of spectacular entertainment, leisure, and penal tourism.

In the post-YouTube era, Dangerous Mediations sounds the call for close readings of music videos produced outside of the corporate culture industries. By connecting historical discussions on postcolonialism, surveillance and prison philosophy with contemporary scholarship on popular music, participatory culture and new media, Dangerous Mediationsis the first book to ask critical questions about the politics of pop music and audiovisual mediation in early 21st-century detention centres.

For reviews and more, visit Dangerous Mediations on the Bloomsbury website.

BUY HERE

Out Now!

About the book:

Who runs the world? The Beyhive knows. From the Destiny's Child 2001 hit single "Survivor" to her 2019 jam "7/11," Beyoncé Knowles-Carter has confronted dominant issues around the world. Because her image is linked with debates on race, sexuality, and female empowerment, she has become a central figure in pop music and pop culture. Beyoncé: At Work, On Screen, and Online explores her work as a singer, activist, and artist by taking a deep dive into her songs, videos, and performances, as well as responses from her fans. Contributors look at Beyoncé's entire body of work to examine her status as a canonical figure in modern music and do not shy away from questioning scandals or weighing her social contributions against the evolution of feminism, critical race theory, authenticity, and more. Full of examples from throughout Beyoncé's career, this volume presents listening as a political undertaking that generates meaning and creates community. Beyoncé: At Work, On Screen, and Onlinecontends that because of her willingness to address societal issues within her career, Beyoncé has become an important touchstone for an entire generation—all in a day's work for Queen Bey.

Table of Contents

Introduction / Melanie L. Marshall and Martin Iddon
Part I: Beyoncé at Work, Making Beyoncé
1. Emily J. Lordi / Surviving the Hustle: Beyoncé's Performance of Work
2. Will Fulton / "A Scientist of Songs": Beyoncé's Recording Studio Music Making and the Problem of Authorship in Popular Music
3. Lisa Colton / "Singing All The Time": Constructions of Cultural Identity in Beyoncé's I am... Sasha Fierce
Part II: Beyoncé On Screen, Reading Beyoncé
4. Julia Cox / Beyoncé's Mixed Media Feminism: Sounding, Staging, and Sampling Gender Politics in "***Flawless"
5. Jaap Koojiman / "At Last a Dream That I Can Call My Own": Beyoncé and the Performance of Stardom in Dreamgirls and Cadillac Records
6. Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley / For the Texas Bama Femme: A Black Queer Femme-inist Reading of Beyoncé's "Sorry"
7. Eduardo Viñuela / Gypsying Beyoncé: The Latin Crossover through Hispanic Stereotypes
Part III: Beyoncé Online, Re-presenting Beyoncé
8. Mary Fogarty Woehrel / Unlikely Resemblances: "Single Ladies," and Comparative Judgment of Popular Dance
9. Áine Mangaoang / "I See Music": Beyoncé, YouTube, and the Question of Signed-Songs
10. Melissa Avdeeff / "Girl I'm Tryna Kick It With Ya": Tracing the Reception of "7/11"'s Embodiment of Girl/Bedroom Culture Through YouTube Reaction Videos

Available to buy in paperback, hardback and ebook formats at the Indiana University Press website.

Spotify playlists of the songs, artists, and labels as they appear in Made in Ireland: Studies in Popular Music are published on the Global Popular Music website here.

Links to each of the playlists based on five different sections of the book are as follows:

Playlist #1 (Introduction & Preface) can be found here.

Playlist #2 (Part 1: Chapters 1-6) can be found here.

Playlist #3 (Part 2: Chapters 7-12) can be found here.

Playlist #4 (Part 3: Chapters 13-17) can be found here.

Playlist #5 (Coda & Afterword) can be found here.

A recording of the virtual booklaunch held on 30.10.2020 can be found here.

And plans for a Made in Ireland blog, podcast and other exciting things are afoot, so be in touch if you’d like to get involved!

Out now!

Made in Ireland: Studies in Popular Music serves as a comprehensive and thorough introduction to the history, sociology and musicology of 20th- and 21st-century Irish popular music. The volume consists of essays by leading scholars in the field and covers the major figures, styles and social contexts of popular music in Ireland. Each essay provides adequate context so readers understand why the figure or genre under discussion is of lasting significance to Irish popular music. The book is organized into three thematic sections: Music Industries and Historiographies, Roots and Routes and Scenes and Networks. 

Order via Routledge, get 20% off with the discount code FLR40.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Popular Music in Ireland: Mapping the Field

ÁINE MANGAOANG, JOHN O’FLYNN AND LONÁN Ó BRIAIN

Part 1: Music Industries and Historiographies

1 A History of Irish Record Labels from the 1920s to 2019

MICHAEL MARY MURPHY

2 Broadcasting Rock: The Fanning Sessions as a Gateway to New Music

HELEN GUBBINS AND LONÁN Ó BRIAIN

3 Don’t Believe A Word? Memoirs of Irish Rock Musicians

LAURA WATSON

4 Raging Mother Ireland: Faith, Fury and Feminism in the Body, Voice and Songs of Sinéad O’Connor

AILEEN DILLANE

5 "Missing From the Record": Zrazy and Women's Music in Ireland

ANN-MARIE HANLON 

6 "Alternative Ulster": The First Wave of Punk in Northern Ireland (1976-1983)

TIMOTHY A. HERON

Part 2: Roots and Routes

7 Irish Lady Sings the Blues: History, Identity and Ottilie Patterson

NOEL McLAUGHLIN AND JOANNA BRANIFF

8 The Politics of Sound: Modernity and Post-Colonial Identity in Irish-language Popular Song 

TRÍONA NÍ SHÍOCHÁIN

9 Communal Voices: The Songs of Tom a’ tSeoighe and Ciarán Ó Fátharta

SÍLE DENVIR

10 Popular Music as a Weapon: Irish Rebel Songs and the Onset of the Northern Ireland Troubles

STEPHEN R. MILLAR

11 "…Practically Rock Stars Now": Changing Relations Between Traditional and Popular Music in a Post-Revival Tradition

ADRIAN SCAHILL

12 "Other voices" in Media Representations of Irish popular music

JOHN O’FLYNN

Part 3: Scenes and Networks

13 Assembling the Underground: Scale, Value and Visibility in Dublin’s DIY Music Scene

JAIME JONES

14 Parochial Capital and the Cork Music Scene

EILEEN HOGAN

15 Death of a Local Scene? Music in Dublin in the Digital Age

CAROLINE ANN O’SULLIVAN

16 Fit for Consumption?: Fanzines and Fan Communication in Irish DIY Music Scenes

CIARÁN RYAN

17 Hip Hop Interpellation: Rethinking Autochthony and Appropriation in Irish Rap

J. GRIFFITH ROLLEFSON

Coda

18 Making Spaces, Saving Places: Modern Irish Popular Music and the Green Turn

GERRY SMYTH 

Afterword

19 Songs of Love: A Conversation with Neil Hannon (The Divine Comedy)

ÁINE MANGAOANG

Reviews:

"There can be little doubt that Ireland is an enduring and prolific presence in the world of popular music. The editors of this book are to be congratulated on drawing together a quality cast of contributors, whose expertise in various aspects of Irish popular music serves to produce a rich and compelling exploration of the significance and legacy of Irish popular music artists in both local and global contexts."

- Andy Bennett (Griffith University), author of Popular Music and Youth Culture: Music, Identity and Place

"Made in Ireland is the most comprehensive and wide-ranging study of popular music (broadly understood) in Ireland currently available. The contributors come from a variety of disciplines and offer a number of illuminating perspectives that should make this book of interest to readers in popular music studies more broadly."

- Timothy D. Taylor (UCLA), author of Global Pop: World Music, World Markets

"This unique volume addresses a number of lacunae in Irish Music Studies in a way that broadens and deepens the field immeasurably. Extending far beyond the jigs and reels of pub sessions or performances at rural song circles, Made in Ireland is both urgent and immediate in its examination of Ireland’s direct engagement with rock, hip hop, country, punk, and other popular genres. Underlying these sounds is a pulse of identity, rebellion, and connection to place and scene that no other current book explores."

- Sean Williams (Evergreen State College), author of Focus: Irish Traditional Music

The Association of Internet Researchers has decided that the annual conference that was scheduled to take place in Dublin on October 28 – 31, 2020 will now be hosted as a virtual event. 

Visit the AoIR website for more details: https://aoir.org/aoir2020updatedinfo/

“LISTEN TO THE SONG HERE IN MY HEART”: BEYONCÉ, YOUTUBE AND SIGNED-SONGS

Áine Mangaoang, University of Oslo

Video of pre-recorded lightning talk of accepted AoIR paper: (link to follow)

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Youtube, music and cyberculture before and after the new decade

Conference programme available here.

In February 14th of 2005, Youtube was founded and grew to become the biggest online platform for video sharing. In these past 15 years, billions of audiovisual contents have been produced, shared, transformed, downloaded and consumed by billions of users worldwide, placing this website as a central hub for their daily lives while browsing the internet. While Youtube was - and still is - a recognized online space that provided new digital formats of content production and sharing, this platform also marked this past decade in the social, political and cultural spectrums of everyday life, creating new work logics and forms of labour (from DIY to self-made Youtubers), creative communities and social bubbles in this cyberspace. Alongside Youtube, the rapid and ever growing technological developments of the internet shaped how modern life is, nowadays, always connected in a global cloud. From smartphones to laptops, from televisions to refrigerators, technology plays a central role in the current paradigm of connectivity, social networks and instant feedback culture. Music, in many ways, as a social device, is inseparable of these processes, being a key element of our daily routines. Music was progressively molded and adapted to the technological and social demands of the past years, but also took part in shaping in several ways the new technology itself. This dual connection enabled the predominance of music and its sociocultural practices in several online platforms, forums and specialized websites, while at the same time, the role of the user and their input is central to the participatory culture that defines the current era. The boundaries between users and producers are increasingly blurred, if not already inexistent, and many of the contents available online are the result of the individual investment of the produsers, allowing to share their own personal interests with cybercommunities formed around specific objects.

Considering these aspects, it’s of the utmost relevance to discuss how musical practices - composing, listening, playing, teaching - have been transformed in the past fifteen years and what is to be expected and considered to be the future of music in the next decade of 2020. How was Youtube a trigger in the consolidation of new audiovisual formats online from its start? What are the new and reinvented forms of music production and consumption in digital spaces? Are these online platforms contributing to ease our daily lives? How is the internet transforming the creative industries and the agents who play a part in them? What are the main changes in music production and consumption in the industry of entertainment and audiovisual media? And also, how is the internet relevant for musicology, both as a tool and/or an object? This conference aims to gather students, academics, artists, teachers, composers, performers and other interested parties in the discussion and research on music, internet and cyberculture, inquiring about the role of the social, cultural and technological transformations in the digital paradigm regarding the consumption, circulation, production and remediation of music. 

The 56th Annual Conference of the Royal Musical Association will be hosted by Goldsmiths, University of London, between 8th and 10th September 2020.

There will be two keynote events at the conference:

The Peter le Huray lecture will be delivered by Dr Marie Thompson. Dr Thompson’s research centres on the gendered, affective and sociopolitical dimensions of sonic media and auditory culture. She is the author of Beyond Unwanted Sound: Noise, Affect and Aesthetic Moralism (Bloomsbury, 2017) and the co-editor of Sound, Music, Affect: Theorizing Sonic Experience (Bloomsbury, 2013). She is the academic lead of the University of Lincoln’s Extra-Sonic Practice research group and the co-lead (with Annie Goh) of the Sonic Cyberfeminisms project, which critically examines the intersections of gender, sound and technology.

The Edward Dent medal award lecture will be delivered by the 2019 award winner Dr Gundula Kreuzer. In both her writing and her teaching, Dr Kreuzer approaches music from a wide range of interdisciplinary perspectives, such as social, cultural, and political history as well as theories of technology and multimedia. Her award-winning first book, Verdi and the Germans: From Unification to the Third Reich (Cambridge University Press, 2010), examines the changing impact of the popular Italian composer on German musical self-perception and national identity. Her second monograph, Curtain, Gong, Steam: Wagnerian Technologies of Nineteenth-Century Opera (University of California Press, 2018) addresses how composers since the late eighteenth century increasingly tried to control certain aspects of staging by embracing specific stage technologies. Focusing on the cultural resonances and hermeneutic potentials of the titular technologies of the curtain, the tam-tam, and steam before, in, and beyond Wagner, the book develops a deeply contextualized practical perspective on the nature and ephemerality of staged opera as well as its legacies in contemporary culture. Dr Kreuzer’s first monograph won the 2011 Lewis Lockwood Award of the American Musicological Society, the 2012 Gaddis Smith International Book Prize of the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale, and the inaugural Martin Chusid Award for Verdi Studies (2013). Among other grants and awards, Kreuzer has received the Paul A. Pisk Prize (2000) and the Alfred Einstein Award (2006) from the American Musicological Society, as well as the RMA’s Jerome Roche Prize (2006).

Retromania? Problematizing Popular Music Heritage Futures

Panel feat. Robert Knifton (University of Leeds), Marion Leonard (University of Liverpool), Paul Long (Monash University), Áine Mangaoang (University of Oslo) and Synnøve Engevik (Rockheim Popular Music Museum).

How can we theorise popular music as an emergent and future sub-category within heritage discourse, given the productive yet problematic relationship between these two disciplines? Taking Reynolds’  Retromania (2011) critique as a start point, we will ask what underpins the duality of attraction and antagonism between popular music and heritage theory?

Recent years have witnessed a growth in academic investigation into heritage themes in popular music studies, via the work of academics such as Baker, Bennett, Brandellero, Cohen, Henning, Leonard, Johnson, Long and Le Guern, for example. Publications such as Site of Popular Music Heritage (2015) and The Routledge Companion to Popular Music History and Heritage (2018) have engaged with heritage themes and theories, whilst often utilizing such terminology in alternate modes, arguing for the exceptionalism of popular music as a category, or resisting the designation of popular music as heritage entirely.

This growth of academic scrutiny is a result of heritage organisations developing popular music exhibitions, displays and experiences in increasing frequency – from the V&A’s series of blockbuster popular music exhibitions such as David Bowie Is (2013) and Pink Floyd: Their Mortal Remains (2017) through to local heritage archives, displays and activities (see for instance, Home of Metal, 2011-Present) and mapping of music heritage such as The Dublin Music Map (2016).

We will discuss how popular music studies and heritage theory may extend, deepen and complicate the critical dialogue between the disciplines, and consider what the future of popular music heritage might look like. Questions explored will include:

·     Nostalgia and memory in popular music heritage discourse

·     Collecting and documenting ephemeral popular music practices as heritage

·     Representing global heritages and popular music heritage under threat

·     Popular music as intangible cultural heritage and the new digital folkloric

·     Risks to the preservation of popular music heritage for the future

Panel presented as part of the ACHS 2020 Futures international and interdisciplinary conference.

About ACHS 2020 Futures:

It is run by a local organising committee drawn from a range of institutions and disciplinary backgrounds. The local organising committee is supported by a scientific committee who will review proposals and help to shape the intellectual agenda of the conference.

The Association of Critical Heritage Studies (ACHS) is an international network of scholars, researchers and practitioners working in the broad and interdisciplinary field of heritage studies. The primary aim of ACHS is to promote heritage as an area of critical enquiry. Inspired by the paradigms of change inherent in postcolonial studies, and the developing interest in critical heritage studies as a field of research and academic engagement, it was officially founded in 2012, in Gothenburg, Sweden. The fifth biennial ACHS conference aims to build on and consolidate the networks established by previous conferences held in Gothenburg, Sweden (2012), Canberra, Australia (2014), Montreal, Canada (2016) and Hangzhou, China (2018), some of which have attracted almost a thousand international delegates.

Keynotes:

Dolly Jørgensen, Professor of History at University of Stavanger, Norway.

Sharon Macdonald, founding Director of the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) and Alexander von Humboldt Professor in Social Anthropology (with an emphasis on Museum and Heritage Studies) at the Institute of European Ethnology at the Humbolt University of Berlin.

Karen Salt, director of the Centre for Research in Race and Rights at the University of Nottingham, UK.

Kavita Singh is Professor and Dean in the School of Arts & Aesthetics at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India.

Organised by the UCL Institute of Archaeology in association with the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) Heritage Priority Area and the Association of Critical Heritage Studies.