[ecrea] Call for Papers: Music & Magic

*Music and Magic: Call for Articles*

This special issue of /Popular Music/ will focus on the intersection of 
popular music with ‘magic’, however authors may wish to define the term.

Despite its relegation to ‘entirely misunderstood hocus pocus’ (Henry 
2001) since the development in the 17^th  century of modern music and 
acoustic science (see Gouk 1999), the notion of magic has continued to 
shape and influence our engagement with the world as one particular mode 
of knowledge –typically (but not necessarily convincingly) when pitted 
against so-called reason and science. In /Totem and Taboo/, originally 
published in 1913, Freud contends that magic is a body of instructions, 
a technique that primitive men and neurotics mobilise when they are 
confident about their possibility to control the world –when they 
believe, specifically, that their acts can influence other persons or 
things, by a rather straightforward process of imitation. This does not 
just concern neurotics and savages, however, but also artists : in the 
modern, scientific age, ‘only in art does it still happen that a man who 
is consumed by desires performs something resembling the accomplishment 
of those desires and that what he does in play produces emotional 
effects –thanks to artistic illusion- just as though it were something 
real’ (Freud 1975 p.90). The desire, and sometimes the ability, to 
produce emotional effects thanks to an imitative process with one’s 
inner wishes is a fundamental characteristic of magic, which Freud also 
defines as ‘the omnipotence of thought’ (/ibid/. p.85). Further, and 
although he does not develop this point, Freud claims that the frequent 
comparison of artists to magicians is not just a matter of hyperbole, 
but also indicative of something more significant, a sense that artists 
(musicians?) can control or change the world.

There is no doubt that magic has its sceptics and critics. For Roland 
Barthes (1957), magic is the shutting-down of critical faculties, the 
regrettable depoliticisation of language, the acceptance of the world as 
it is presented to us by dominant discourse, most powerfully that of 
consumer capitalism. In a similar vein, although only in passing, David 
McGuiness (2016) recently took issue with the mobilisation of a 
vocabulary of magic in popular music criticism, alleging that it 
amounted to analytical ignorance.

Conversely, however, it is often for these very reasons of orderly 
appearance or satisfaction with the state of things that magic also 
appeals to many. For those regarded as mystics today, from Plotinus 
writing in 200AD to Schopenhauer and since, music can be an enchantment, 
a ‘form of sorcery that raises no question’ with the capacity to calm 
thought, to transcend the human condition of suffering, and/or to grant 
access to the world of ‘the Beyond’ (Godwin 1987). On a certain level, 
contemporary popular music is saturated with magic, with many artists 
following rituals prior to performance, like Beyoncé and Adele who 
reportedly invoke their respective alter egos (Denham 2015), and others 
who use a ‘magical’ language to transform and assert their gender 
identity, such as the Japanese hip hop artist Hime (Condry 2006). Others 
suffuse their compositions and performance with the presence of 
sometimes long-dead others, including African American vocalists from 
Billie Holiday to Tracy Chapman who capture the memory of slave escapees 
(Davis 1999). Audiences and critics, too, frequently report having been 
mesmerized by performers (Looseley 2015 provides such accounts about 
Edith Piaf). In fact, given that the academic sub-field of Star Studies 
hinges on the premise that stars exist thanks to the propitious 
alignment of factors external to our control, i.e. the right type, place 
and time (Dyer 1998), an argument exists for the recognition that pop 
stars are fundamentally magic figures, our contextual analysis of their 
success being necessarily incomplete. Back in 1981, Simon Frith insisted 
that myths and magic existed insofar as cultural participants believed 
in them and found them comforting, giving the example of rock songs that 
conjured up, for those who so desired, a working-class street culture. 
Eric Weisbard (2005) similarly proposed to focus our academic study on 
the ‘magic moments’ of musical experiences, insisting that scholars 
should accept and recognize those instances when rapture, accidents, a 
sense of vertigo or one’s perplexity (‘the quizzical, not the 
categorical’) takes centre stage in life, and all thanks to music.

These different interpretations of magic relate to control, with magic 
offering an illusion of coherence and confidence to artists, consumers 
and critics, and having the ability to re-enchant an implicitly and 
excessively rational world –whether this is interpreted as welcome 
comfort or as political disengagement.

So, when is magic actually mobilised in and around music-making? What 
does the mobilisation of magic reveal about the values and practices 
that underpin our contemporary popular music culture? What does the idea 
of magic bring to music, and to our understanding of the world?

This special issue seeks to explore these issues, asking its 
contributors to think through the musical implications of the concept of 
magic and to re-examine the habitual polarisation of the term against 
reason and science. Below are some non-prescriptive suggestions for 
contribution:

·Music as a metaphor for cosmic organisation, for social ‘harmony’

·Magic and musical inspiration,the artist’s connection with ‘the other side’

·Magic and fascination, listeners and consumers ‘under the spell’ of music

·Fetishes, rituals

·Music and magic-related notions, including (alphabetically listed): 
angels, chance, charisma, destiny, fate, incantation, luck, saints, 
shamans, stars, supernatural, trances, visions, voodoo, witchcraft…

*Deadline for abstracts (500 words): 30 April 2017*

*Deadline for articles (max. 10,000 words, bibliography inclusive): 28 
February 2018*

*Peer-review process in Spring 2018*

*Planned publication : January 2019*

Please send your proposals or any queries to the special issue editors, 
Barbara Lebrun ((barbara.lebrun /at/ manchester.ac.uk) 
<mailto:(barbara.lebrun /at/ manchester.ac.uk)>) and Nanette de Jong 
((nanette.de-jong /at/ newcastle.ac.uk) <mailto:(nanette.de-jong /at/ newcastle.ac.uk)>).

**

**

**

*Bibliography : *

Barthes, Roland/Mythologies/ (Paris: Points Seuil, 1957)

Condry, Ian. /Hip-hop Japan: Rap and the paths of cultural 
globalization/ (Duke University Press, 2006)

Davis, Angela Yvonne. /Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude" Ma" 
Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday/ (Vintage books, 1999)

Denham, Jess. ‘Chris Evans confuses Adele with Beyoncé’, /The 
Independent/, 23 October 2015.

Dyer, Richard. /Stars/ (London: British Film Institut ,1998 [1979]).

Freud, Sigmund. ‘Animism ,Magic and the Omnipotence of Thoughts’ in 
/Totem and Taboo/ [originally 1913], /The Standard Edition of the 
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud/, vol.xiii (London: The 
Hogarth Press, 1975), 75-99.

Frith, Simon. ‘“The magic that can set you free”: the ideology of folk 
and the myth of the rock community’, /Popular Music/, 1 (1981), 159-68.

Godwin, Joscelyn (ed). /Music, mysticism and magic : a sourcebook/ 
(London: Arkana, 1987).

Gouk, Penny. /Music, Science and Natural Magic in 17^th  century 
England/ (Yale, 1999)



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