Introduction: New Perspectives on Popular Music in Asia, Shelley Brunt

Ideology and the performance of Chineseness: Hong Kong singers on the CCTV stage, Lauren Gorfinkel

God Bless come back: new experiments with nostalgia in Indonesian rock, Emma Baulch

The success of hopelessness: the evolution of Korean indie music, Hyunjoon Shin

Soundscapes in Vedic metal: a perspective from Singapore, Eugene Dairianathan

The call for papers for the Wellington proceedings is now available to download. We warmly invite you to send your papers for consideration.

You’ll note the deadline is Friday February 3, however you’re welcome to submit material before then if you want to get it off your desk while it’s still fresh from the conference. Also, if you are interested in being a referee please let us know (of course we will keep this process ‘blind’, but we welcome expressions of interest for those happy to join the referee pool).

Nashville hosts the highest concentration of music businesses of any U.S city, with more than 200 recording studios, 130 music publishers, 100 live music venues, and 80 record labels. The initiative will allow a songwriter the chance to immerse themselves in the Nashville music scene and to further develop their own artistic skills and industry networks and relationships.

“The Australia Council is really excited about the possibilities that this residency opens up,” says Matthew Hindson, Chair of the Australia Council Music Board. “Nashville is a hub for songwriting and Australians have a long and impressive history of writing great songs.”

The residency is the result of a partnership between the Australia Council’s Music Board and Nashville-based songwriter and producer Mark Moffatt. Mark Moffatt is a songwriter, producer, and resident of Nashville since 1996. As Director of A&R at Ten Ten until 2001 he worked extensively in the development of Keith Urban. His production credits include Keith Urban, the Saints, Yothu Yindi, the Divinyls, Neil and Tim Finn, Slim Dusty, Tony Joe White, and many others. Mark will work with the successful songwriter to establish a base of knowledge, relationships and business contacts within the Nashville music scene.

Applications for the residency will close 12 March 2012. More details about the Nashville Songwriter Residency are available here, or contact Australia Council staff member Andy Rantzen – a.rantzen@australiacouncil.gov.au or 02 9215 9115 .

Deadline for abstracts and panels: March 5th 2012 (individual papers: 500words, +50 word bio; and for 3x person panels: panel title, lead/contact person; 3x 500 word abstracts, plus 3x individual 50 word biographies)

Successful abstracts notified by: 6th April

Enquiries/abstracts to: celebritystudies@gmail.com

Conference Website: www.deakin.edu.au/arts-ed/scca/events/celebrity

Sponsored by the Centre for Memory, Imagination and Invention, Deakin University

Routledge and Deakin University are pleased to announce the inaugural Celebrity Studies Conference. The conference, organised by Sean Redmond and James Bennett, will be the first major international, inter-disciplinary forum for discussion and analysis of the growing field of celebrity studies. Drawing on the strength of the CSJ editorial team, the conference welcomes submissions from a broad range of disciplines that generate new ways of thinking and understanding celebrity: from film, television, digital media and theatre studies through to sociology, politics and business studies.

The first inaugural Celebrity Studies Conference will be themed on the question of ‘celebrity studies now’. This subject will run through our plenaries and form a strand running throughout the conference. However, we invite abstracts for individual 20 minute papers or pre-constituted panels of 3 x 20minute papers on any topic in celebrity studies.

Confirmed keynote speakers:
· Richard Dyer (Kings College, University of London)
· Christine Holmlund (President SCMS, University of Tennessee, Knoxville)
· P. David Marshall (Deakin University)
· Susan Murray (New York University)
· Graeme Turner (University of Queensland)

A special issue of the best papers from the conference will be published in Celebrity Studies in 2013.

Introduction: Asian modernities, musical traditions and strategies of engagement, Adrian McNeil

‘Sounding Japan’: traditional musical instruments, cultural nationalism and educational reform, Henry Johnson

Malaysian composers, geopolitical spaces and cultural difference, Jonas Ureta Baes

Negotiation and hybridity in new Balinese music: Sanggar Bona Alit, a case study, Manolete Mora

Kon baan diaokan or ‘we’re from the same village’ – star/fan interaction in Thai lukthung, James Mitchell

Reviews: Revisionist Popular Music History, Roy Shuker

Portal Vol 8, No 1 (2011): Terpsichorean Architecture: Writing About Music

Location: Hotel Windsor, 111 Spring Street, Melbourne, Australia

Conference Organisers: Associate Professor Shane Homan (Monash University, Professor Martin Cloonan (University of Glasgow), Dr Jennifer Cattermole (Otago University)

Keynote Speaker: Professor John Street, University of East Anglia

Confirmed Speakers:
Professor Bruce Johnson, Macquarie University/University of Turku
Associate Professor Roy Shuker, Victoria University, Wellington
Professor Chris Gibson, University of Wollongong
Professor Marcus Breen, Bond University
Patrick Donovan, Music Victoria

To mark the completion of the Australian Research Council project Policy Notes: Local Popular Music in Global Creative Economies, the Research Unit in Media Studies at Monash University is convening a conference examining popular music policy.

Popular music provides many social and cultural sources of pleasure through its live performance, recording, publishing, music instruments, education and training industries. It continues to drive related audiovisual industries (television, film, advertising, radio, mobile phones) and a range of ‘secondary’ sectors (rehearsal studios, music press, merchandising, audio hardware). The music industries lead processes of convergence of content, technologies, industries and audiences that have implications for national media policies and accompanying discourses of cultural nationalism and citizenship. The nation-state remains crucial in determining the construction of meaning in popular music. This conference considers the historical and contemporary relationships between the state and popular music, with an emphasis upon both the formation and effects of popular music policy. While much has been written about the expanding flow of music products and music creativity in emphasising the global nature of popular music, little attention has been paid to the flow of ideas about policy formation and debates between regions and nations. We welcome contributions that assist in understanding city, national and international policy agendas and their implications for both producers and consumers. Contributions are invited from people with all forms of involvement in music activity, including academics, policy-makers, industry workers, musicians, fans and music journalists.

We welcome papers on all aspects of popular music policy, including:
· Popular music and creative/cultural industry strategies
· Urban culture and planning, regional development
· Artistic versus economic objectives
· National identity
· Education, health and citizenship
· Intellectual property
· Funding practices and discourses
· Infrastructure and institutions
· Media content and regulation
· Trade and tourism
· Policy research methodology
· Censorship
· Cultural labour and cultural policy

The organisers welcome individual papers or themed panel proposals.

Abstract Submission: Abstracts of up to 350 words in 12-point font can be emailed to Associate Professor Shane Homan (Shane.Homan@monash.edu) as a Word document. Please use your surname as the title of your Word document. The abstract must include:

Name of presenter(s)
Institution/Organisation
Title of paper
Contact phone numbers and email address
Abstract (350 words or less)

Abstracts must be submitted by 1 December 2011.

Many thanks to those of you who have already registered.  For those of you who have not yet registered, we would ask that you let us know as soon as possible, and no later than November 10th, as to whether or not you are attending.  This is for the purposes of programming as well as catering, etc.

Registration form and payment details.

Accommodation and travel information.

Queer theory is likely one of the most well-known and controversial recent schools of thought, and its impact has been felt in the academic world and beyond. It appeared in the early 1990s in the United States, as a direct offshoot of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered) collectives, the work of Foucault (in particular, his History of Sexuality and ideas such as “biopolitics”), and Derrida’s deconstructionism. This school of thought, while in no way a homogenous trend, is characterized by the questioning of the notion of gender and the idea that sexual identity and behaviour would be genetically determined. In this context, queer theory formulates the hypothesis that sexuality is actually a social construction. This presumes that sexuality is not biologically stamped on human nature, but rather takes on ever-changing social forms, wherein a given individual can live out one or many sexual identities. This hypothesis leads us to call into question social classifications from the fields of traditional psychology, philosophy, anthropology, and sociology, which tend to look at one measure at a time for classifying individuals (class, gender, etc.).

Musicology has also fallen under the influence of queer theory, what with the research groups, books, articles, and dissertations that address previously unexplored or even taboo issues, such as the construction of sexual identity through or in music. From a methodological perspective, this school of thought has been part of the recent theoretical renewal at an international level, wherein “traditional” methods of musical analysis and historical musicology are used in concert with historical, sociological, literary, aesthetic, anthropological, and socio-geographical techniques. This allows the researcher to apprehend the construction process of the musical “object” and its social dimension in all its complexity.

This issue of Transposition. Musique et sciences sociales aims to bolster this theoretical overhaul, through articles and case studies which explore ideas from queer theory in music of any genre. We also welcome more theoretical texts which examine the contributions or limitations of this school of thought in the field of musicology.

Papers (in French or in English), which conform to the requirements of the publication (http://transposition-revue.org/spip.php?rubrique4&lang=en), should be addressed to the editing committee before the 31st March 2012 at this address: transposition.submission@gmail.com