Call for Papers

The Local, the Regional, and the Global
in the Emergence of Popular Music Cultures

University of Copenhagen, 24-26 October 2005

Popular music has been important as a means to bring into contact local or regional cultures, sometimes creating alliances and blurring borders, sometimes underscoring local identity in contrast to supra-local levels. Such cultural processes have intensified since the 1940s, calling for a new kind of historical perspective in popular music studies in order to underline the interplay between continuity and change in popular music culture, the inspirations exchanged and the influences between cultures.

Throughout the 20th century popular musical forms have flowed from Great Britain and The USA as musicians and performers both within and outside these areas made use of imitation and copying as a means of appropriating new styles. Seemingly, this caused a strong homogenization of cultures, but the picture is more complex as conceptualisations like syncretism, transculturation and glocalisation have suggested.

This conference will address such processes and examine how the exchange between local, regional and global musics mix and interchange in dialogue as a result of political, social, and cultural encounters mediated in various ways, thus forming new possibilities for social formations and constructions of identities.

In recent years popular music studies have been informed by the theory and methodology of ethnomusicology, and the anthropological study of music has offered itself as a means of addressing the dynamic exchange between the local and the global. The possibility of applying ethnomusicological perspectives to this interchange and to the discourse on place will be one major theme of the conference.

Another major theoretical theme will be how sociological concepts like struggle, cultural field, habitus, etc., especially as they have been developed in Bourdieuian cultural theory, can be applied to the study of popular music. Such concepts thematize the interpretation of the hierarchical structures of popular cultures and the changes taking place as popular music and culture gradually have become more accepted within general culture.

The conference is part of the research project, Danish Rock Culture from the 1950's to the 1980's, consisting of 14 individual projects focussing on different aspects of the culture from different theoretical angles (e.g., ethnomusicology, Bourdieuian cultural theory, historiography, discourse analysis). As Denmark is a small country with a population of 5.4 million, an area of 43.000 square kilometres, and a stable political system it is an ideal object for in-depth studies of the development of a popular music culture in an everyday which is not marked by radical resistant cultures - whether left wing or nationalist - or other highly visible sites of struggle.

The aim of the conference is to investigate the complex cultural processes that have taken place in the negotiations between different music-cultural practices from a local, regional, and global perspective. The conference will present some of the results from the Danish research project, and we invite researchers who work with similar issues of local/regional/global or investigate local music cultures from other perspectives to meet in dialogue with each other about the main theoretical and empirical issues.

Papers should be kept to 20 minutes. There will be 10 minutes for questions. Abstracts of about 250 words are due Monday, May 2, and should be accompanied by a brief bio and full contact info.

Email conference@rockhistorie.dk with your abstracts, as well as questions about the theme, your topic, or the conference in general. Authors will be notified of the Program Committee's decisions by June 1. There is no participation fee.

The conference is funded by the Danish Research Council for the Humanities and organised by IASPM Norden and the Danish research project.