In late November 2013 we were delighted to host Tricia Rose as ICMuS Visiting Professor. Rose is Professor of Africana Studies and the Director of the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown University, Rhode Island, USA, and is best known for her books Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America and The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop – and Why It Matters.

Not only Hip Hop but also Tricia Rose’s broader interrogation of race in the American Post-Civil rights era, and the politics of society and culture under contemporary neoliberalism, were topics of intensive discussion during this residency – involving Rose herself and ICMuS staff and students.

Indeed students, both Postgraduate and Undergraduate, were central participants in these debates. The initiative for the entire visit came out of a consultation with PhD students, who also helped co-curate the residency alongside the Head of Research. During her stay, Tricia spent time advising students on their dissertations, as well featuring as guest speaker (in dialogue with Will Edmondes and Kitty Porteous) in a special session of our Roots of Hip Hop module, attended by some 70 students. Similar numbers participated in Tricia’s culminating research seminar entitled ‘What is the “popular” in black popular culture, today?’

Participants and speakers from the UK, Ireland, Germany, Poland, Spain, Austria, and the US came together to listen to eight papers on legal frameworks of genocide, ways of understanding testimony, and representations of genocide in visual culture. In addition, “A Messenger from Poland”, a film on Jan Karski made and introduced to the delegates by Martin Smith, was shown. Karski worked for the Polish government in exile and tried to inform world leaders about the fate of the Polish Jews. The workshop contributions drew on rich interdisciplinary approaches to the materials of genocide (archival materials, testimonies, diaries, sound recordings, film, photography, site-specific materials and other forms of evidence, legacy or commemoration) with an emphasis on sharing and transmitting expertise across disciplinary boundaries.

The event was generously funded by the School of Arts and Cultures and the School of Modern Languages at Newcastle University.

The organizers of the workshop – Ian Biddle (Music) and Beate Müller (Modern Languages) envisage publishing the revised proceedings.

For abstracts of papers given, click here

AHRC and Newcastle University sponsored two day conference, 20-21 October 2014

Keynote: Dr Gary West, 'Understanding Scotland Musically: Do we? Can we?’

Scottish traditional music has been through a successful revival and has now entered a professionalized and public space. Devolution in the UK, and the rapid expansion of the New Europe have led to a rise of importance of regional and national identities within the context of globalization of musical communities. What was once considered kitsch tartanry has been re-mythologized and now hybrid sounds from Scottish musicians portray a newer, emergent sense of national identity. Increasingly, musicians are performing deterritorialized and commodified music which is shifting attention away from musical provenance and authentic ideology towards more transient sonic identities and blurring established musical genres. This conference seeks to explore how contemporary traditional music performs Scottishness at this crucial moment in the public life of an increasingly (dis)United Kingdom. We have a selection of around 25 exciting papers that deal with the relationship(s) between Scottish traditional music (or Scottish folk music) and: the musical politics of identity; public policy for the arts, tourism and their policy makers; education; the Scottish and UK media; alternative public conceptions of Scottishness; the wider Scottish traditional arts; the independence referendum; other creative practices and their audiences.

Venue: Research Beehive, Old Library Building, Newcastle University (1st Floor).

See conference website for programme and complete directions for travel etc.

November 6th – 7th 2014, 9am-5pm, G21/22 Devonshire Building, Newcastle University, Newcastle-upon-Tyne

Keynote: Dr Pete Dale (Slampt Records, Manchester Metropolitan University)

This two-day interdisciplinary conference will expose, question and celebrate the enduring role of independent and commercial record labels in the construction of musical patrimony, from the early days of the record industry to the present. Record labels have traditionally functioned as organs of representation (replicating for instance racial stereotypes), codification (setting genres and trends), as well as emancipation (allowing for marginal trends, voices and groups of artists to emerge). They exist at the intersection of the public and the personal, capturing the collective imagination as well as the private fascination of the collector. They occupy different spaces and scales, from internationally influential, legendary record labels (Stax, Motown, Columbia) to more obscure, bedroom-run, non-commercial labels (Sarah Records, Musical Traditions). This conference will gather a variety of international perspectives on the past and present legacy of record labels, and examine their changing status and relevance in an age of increasing dematerialisation.

Bringing together a diverse audience which included academics, healthcare professionals, community members, NGO representatives, musicians, artists and people with AIDS, this one-day conference shared cultural and community-orientated activities. The event provided a unique collaborative opportunity to share perspectives on HIV/AIDS across continents, and to examine the many roles which music and culture (and their study) can play in representing, addressing and understanding the AIDS crisis.

The conference was co-organised by Nanette de Jong and Paul Attinello (ICMuS), and linked Newcastle with Limpopo, Eastern Cape and Gauteng Provinces in South Africa and the Zimbabwe cities of Bulawayo and Harare via Skype. 


The event was a collaboration between EU-funded arts development programme Southern African Cultural Leadership (SACL), the Newcastle Patient Participation Team and Newcastle University. This brought a highly distinctive line-up of participants – including members of ICMuS, medical and psychological professionals from the Newcastle RVI Hospital, the patient-run Patient Participation Team and Listening Service of Newcastle.
King Madzikane Dicko II of the Eastern Cape, representatives from GAP Solutions and the Gauteng Department of Health, as well as Zimbabwean musicians, artists and poets, also took part.

Saturday 25 October 2014, 9.30 - 17.00, The Black Gate Learning Suite, Newcastle Castle, Newcastle upon Tyne

Keynote: Prof Stephen Marini (Wellesley College)

This study day considers both professional and amateur musical life beyond the political, economic and cultural capital of England alongside musical relationships between London and the wider British nations and regions. Underpinning localised case studies to be presented and discussed at the study day will be three broad interconnected themes: musical networks and communities; modes of circulation; and surviving musical and music-related sources that illuminate the ways in which music, musical tastes and practices circulated beyond and outside the English capital.

This study day will be the first in a series focusing on these themes, leading to the publication of a collection of essays - the next study day is proposed for 2015. Details will be announced in the Autumn.

Hosted by Newcastle University and The Old Newcastle Project, this study day is part of the SIEGE! Festival, commemorating the 1644 siege and storming of Newcastle. The study day will be held in the recently refurbished Black Gate, the medieval gatehouse to Newcastle’s Norman castle.

To round off the study day, there will be a concert in the Great Hall of the Castle Keep. Shona Mooney and Andy Watt will perform tunes from the Newcastle-based, seventeenth-century Henry Atkinson manuscript alongside music known to have circulated in North-East England and the Scottish Borders in the seventeenth century. Shona was recipient of the 2006 BBC Radio Scotland Young Traditional Musician of the Year. Details of the concert, and to reserve a ticket, please visit www.oldnewcastle.org.uk/events

Programme

You can download the programme

A video of the keynote is now available at the following link: http://research.ncl.ac.uk/mems/recordings/

Abstracts for all of the above presentations (including keynotes) can now be downloaded.

Organising committee:

• Dr Steph Carter (Newcastle University/Old Newcastle Project)

• Dr Kirsten Gibson (Newcastle University)

• Dr Roz Southey (Newcastle University)

This study day is supported by Newcastle University’s School of Arts and Cultures School Strategic Research Fund, International Centre for Music Studies, Medieval and Early Modern Research Group, Newcastle Institute for Social Renewal, and the Old Newcastle Project.

March 2014: ICMuS PhD graduate Paco Francisco Bethencourt Llobet has been offered the position of Professor Asociado at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain. Paco remains active as a researcher into and practitioner of Flamenco guitar; his doctoral thesis ‘Rethinking tradition: towards an ethnomusicology of contemporary flamenco guitar’ can be downloaded from https://theses.ncl.ac.uk/dspace/handle/10443/1305.

Paco joins our growing number of research student graduates who have gained academic posts – for further information, click here.

• presented in association with MEMS (Medieval and Early Modern Studies), Newcastle.

Programme:

• Introduction (Magnus Willimason, ICMuS)

• John Milsom (Liverpool Hope Univesity): ‘Singing Sternhold’s Psalms’

• Dana Marsh (Christ Church, Indianapolis): ‘Chronology, genre, and style: John Sheppard under Edward VI’

• Lucy Kostyanovsky (King’s College London): '"Our father of most pious memorie": the Marian restoration and the Henrician legacy'

The year 2015 more or less marks the 500th birthday of John Sheppard (d. 1558), presenting an opportunity to reconsider a pivotal figure whose career coincided with a period of stylistic innovation and religious upheaval. Sheppard’s posthumous reputation was eclipsed, largely through bad luck: his professional career peaked during the posthumously reviled reign of ‘Bloody’ Mary Tudor; he died young, and his music has tended to be assigned ‘transitional’ status between the twin peaks of Henry VIII and Elizabeth I. 

An international team of scholars is collectively evaluating Sheppard’s impact upon English music, focusing upon his career, music, contexts, consequences and historiography. An important figure in his own right, Sheppard also exemplifies both the wider musical culture of England mid-century and the present-day methods of investigating it. This symposium will focus upon his vernacular psalms and upon the religious and courtly contexts in which he worked as a gentleman of the Chapel Royal.

Performing Prejudice is an ongoing scholarly symposium led by Simon McKerrell (ICMuS) and Kay Goodall (Stirling). The research group’s aim is to exchange ideas and develop a nuanced understanding of performances and manifestations of  prejudice in community encounters with legal, cultural and policy environments. This was the group’s first event and featured 11 papers that together brought a strongly interdisciplinary perspective to bear on the issues. For details of the programme click here.

Researchers from ICMuS (David Clarke) and the Music Faculty of the University of Oxford (Eric Clarke and Ruth Herbert) are jointly convening the Second International Conference on Music and Consciousness at Oxford University on 14-17 April. The event is the successor its forebear held at Sheffield University in July 2006, which led to the book Music and Consciousness: Philosophical, Psychological, and Cultural Perspectives, edited by David Clarke and Eric Clarke (OUP, 2011).

That this second conference includes over 40 papers (compared with 17 at the first) points to the growing importance of music studies for the field of consciousness studies. The multidisciplinary nature of the event is reflected in contributions from invited speakers Professor Judith Becker (University of Michigan), Professor Susan Blackmore (Freelance writer, lecturer and broadcaster, and Visiting Professor, University of Plymouth), and Professor Colin Blakemore (Institute of Philosophy, School of Advanced Study University of London).

For more information about the conference, [click here](link to http://www.music.ox.ac.uk/muscon2/). For more on Music and Consciousness as an ongoing ICMuS research project, click here.

Thursday 30 April and Friday 1 May 2015. The English Fiddle Symposium - Fiddles on Fire

Keynote Speaker: Dr Alan Jabbour

We are pleased to announce the first English Fiddle Symposium, organised by Newcastle University in partnership with Sage Gateshead. The Symposium is designed as a sister event to the Folkworks Fiddles on Fire festival at Sage Gateshead, to run 2 to 3 May 2015.

The aim of the English Fiddle Symposium is to bring together a wide range of expertise, thinking and practice, to discover the "state of the nation" for the fiddle in traditional English music. We aim to discuss and document the current shared aesthetics of performance practice, and to provide a forum for the further dialogue about regional styles, repertoire, belonging and mediation of traditional English music. In so doing we aim to share understandings about the fiddle tradition in the English context, in terms of the transmission, educational utility and digitalization of English folk music, the place of song accompaniment in shaping the new tradition and ultimately, to create a useful resource focused upon the fiddle in English traditional music.

Tickets for the event can be purchased directly from the Sage

The deadline for the Call for papers has now expired, and we are working on putting together an exciting programme, which will be available to view and download shortly.

The programme will include contributions from a wide range of practice, including but not limited to the disciplines of musicology, ethnomusicology, history, performance practice, arts management, policy-making etc. The following list of topics is indicative and not meant to be exclusive: • Work on existing archives and other forms of retrieval of old repertoires • New contributions to English fiddle repertoire or practice • The role of the fiddle in ensemble playing and the use of fiddle as self-accompaniment to song • The fiddle in social, traditional or ceremonial dance • Is there a distinctive English fiddle style? Where do the borders lie? Is it more meaningful to refer to surviving (or emerging) regionalities such as Southwest, Northeast etc? • The influence of Scandinavian and other European repertoires on English practice • Case studies of notable practitioners, past or present • Practice-based or mixed contributions A selection of papers will be included in an edited book or journal.

We are witnessing a successful revival in English folk music, a thriving performing scene, and robust teaching traditions. However, in comparison to the visibility of World and Celtic musics, English folk music has been neglected within the public discourse, particularly in the press, radio and television.

The English media, although they comprise a substantial and highly articulate audience for music of ‘the Other’, they often revert to lazy cliché or tired denigration of indigenous musical traditions. English traditional music and English folk music are today healthier than ever before, but are unevenly geographically distributed. The Edwardian collectors, in particular, discovered and preserved much of our dance music, met many players and documented what they found. But old music is still being unearthed, re-contextualized and recorded by modern collectors, performers and enthusiasts. Today there is a substantive community of professional and semi-professional performers driving the current folk revival performing alongside and within vibrant community settings where English folk music constitutes a powerful practice for community belonging and social cohesion.

Eliza Carthy Catriona Macdonald (Symposium Directors) International Centre for Music Studies, School of Arts & Cultures, Armstrong Building, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU.