*CFP* "MUSIC", VOLUME 8, Nº 1 (MARCH, 2022), CONCENTRIC: LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES

In William Blake’s “Introduction” to Songs of Innocence, the poet is also a musician, converting his piping into writing at the instigation of an angelic child. This originary link between music and literature—reflective of the (pre)historical oral transmission of myths and tales—continues unbroken to the present, as evidenced by the many musical interpretations of Blake’s poems, from American composer David Axelrod to the rock band U2.

This issue of Concentric seeks to explore the mutual influence between music and literature and to cultivate new methodological (and pedagogical) approaches to this relationship. While Vincent Barletta’s recent Rhythm: Form and Dispossession (2020) provides a transhistorical, ontological account of the primordial power of music, other scholars have examined its role in specific texts or cultural traditions: for instance, Elizabeth K. Helsinger’s Poetry and the Thought of Song in Nineteenth-Century Britain (2015) and Brent Hayes Edwards’s Epistrophes: Jazz and the Literary Imagination (2017). Edwards’s title plays on the incorporation into jazz of epistrophes, a literary device where words are repeated at the end of successive clauses. Such translation also works in the opposite direction, as in the musical leitmotif or idée fixe (as famously given in Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, for example), later used to describe literary leitmotifs. Thus, literary elements and structures are incorporated into such wide-ranging musical forms as Romantic orchestral music (e.g., the program notes to Symphonie fantastique), jazz, and—as Elizabeth Hoffman suggests in “‘I’-Tunes: Multiple Subjectivities and Narrative Method in Computer Music” (2012)—computer music. 

*CFP* "PROSECUTING AND POLICING RAP", SPECIAL ISSUE, POPULAR MUSIC JOURNAL

Contributions are invited to a special issue of Popular Music on the complex interface between rap music (taken in its broadest sense to include mainstream rap, gangsta rap, grime, drill, activist rap, etc.) and criminal justice systems around the world. Rap music is an international youth-cultural powerhouse and, while its spread has been celebrated, it has also been attended by mounting criminalisation. This special issue asks researchers to explore the policing and prosecuting of rap and how this has been framed in media reporting. It also considers what might make rap susceptible to such state criminalization and how rappers, communities, civil liberties groups, defence lawyers, and scholars have come to challenge ‘prosecuting rap’.

The growing use of rap music in criminal and civil proceedings has emerged as a well-documented debate and issue of public concern in the US—dubbed ‘Rap on Trial’ (as per the title of Erik Nielson and Andrea Dennis’ recent book).However, outside the US, it is much less understood and there is a pressing need for more scrutiny and critique. This special issue is particularly interested in work that addresses case studies and trends in the global South; in Britain and other non-US parts of the global North; and in comparative work on the US in relation to other countries.

*CFP* “STREET MUSIC CONFERENCE”, AHRC CONNECTED COMMUNITIES PROGRAMME

This FREE conference, organised by the AHRC Connected Communities programme, seeks to explore an important but neglected aspect of public culture and community construction: street music. It aims to draw together the new knowledge and practice generated by funded research projects across Connected Communities with work across a number of academic disciplines as well as the creative sector. Following Connected Communities established practice, the conference seeks to function as a place for dialogue between academics, independent researchers, musicians, performers, and the arts and cultural policy sectors.

From brass bands to buskers to ballad singers, organ grinders to beatboxing, one-man/-person bands to flash mobs, music has long played a role in how we experience the public space of the street. In this conference we aim to contribute to the growing discourse around the role of street music in our contemporary communities and to understand its historical significance. We welcome contributions from researchers, of course, and also street musicians, performers, campaigners, arts producers and cultural workers. (We recognise that these categories may be productively fluid.) Disciplines? Music, but also from cultural and media studies, performance studies, cultural geography, history, leisure and tourism studies, urban planning and architecture, and more, as well as those who may work in inter-disciplinary or indeed ill-disciplinary ways.

*CFP* “SONIC FUTURES: PERFORMING IDENTITY IN THE 'GLOBAL' CITY”, LONDON COLLEGE OF COMMUNICATION

Sonic Futures: Performing Identity in the ‘Global’ City

April 25

London College of Communication

The idea for this one-day conference stems from a series of workshops, Sonic Futures: Identity and Sustainability through Music and Performance, supported by London College of Communication(Teaching and Learning Fund) in collaboration with May Project Gardens (Hip Hop Garden). Adopting a mixed-method approach, this pilot project sought to engage students from LCC in a series of workshops that explored the connections between social issues (e.g. social cohesion, participatory and sustainable practices and active citizenry, to name a few), politics and identity formations at the intersections of class, ethnicity, race, gender and the environment.