[ecrea] 2014 IASPM-US Conference Call: "Music Flows"

2014 IASPM-US ANNUAL CONFERENCE: “MUSIC FLOWS”



Music flows. Evocative metaphorically while directing our attention to 
the global circulation of songs, the theme for the 2014 IASPM-US Annual 
Conference takes its inspiration from the UNC campus-wide Water initiative.



Water in its many forms is a ubiquitous subject of pop songs. Whether as 
metaphor or literal reference, water imagery as a theme in popular music 
has been used to celebrate identity, express emotions, address 
environmental issues, convey pleasure, pay homage to spiritual beings, 
and shape communities of resistance. Here we take up notions of fluidity 
and flow to address not only what many deem our most important natural 
resource, but to consider the ways in which water’s qualities may yield 
productive insights into the present and future of popular music.



Fluidity suggests smoothness and flow, as well as uncertainty, 
indefiniteness, and mutability.  This tension is felt across global 
capital, ecology, and the business of music, as money, energy, and 
sounds flow around the world, their movement unevenly enabled and 
restricted by a range of economic, political, and cultural forces. From 
the licit or illicit circulation of songs to the melting of glaciers, 
popular music – and the world in which it exists – faces a future in 
which the status quo is quite literally in flux. With seemingly solid 
foundations melting away, we face a moment of productive instability, in 
which new potentialities emerge even as life as we know it may be 
dramatically transformed.



The 2014 IASPM-US Annual Conference will take place from March 13-16, 
2014 at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. The Center for 
the Study of the American South (CSAS) will be our host on campus, in 
collaboration with the Department of Music and the Southern Folklife 
Collection. Papers related to popular music and southern culture are 
especially welcome. Look for a featured panel on southern music and 
enjoy a lively reception hosted by the Center.



Papers may focus on one of the following aspects of the theme, on other 
aspects of the conference theme, or – as always – any other issue in the 
study of popular music.



1. Liquidity and flows

Zygmunt Bauman suggests that ours is an era of “liquid modernity,” in 
which subjectivities and social life have been transformed. Liquidity 
indeed seems fundamental to current configurations and imaginaries of 
everything from capital to the music industry and identity. Yet these 
flows are rife with contradiction. Financial institutions circulate 
money through increasingly intricate channels of risk while class 
inequality increases globally. With digital audio files circulating 
widely and streaming internet radio providing us with a flood of music 
for every mood and desire, musical labor, intellectual property, and 
revenue is newly in flux. On the high seas of international exchange, 
piracy, alternately lauded and critiqued, threatens the fixed interests 
of global culture industries.



How have the infrastructures that bridge, dam, or contain spaces of 
fluidity (of music, capital, or water) figured in popular music? What of 
their futures? How are flows managed, in ways that both enable and 
restrict circulation? How are subjectivities shaped or expressed by the 
flows of technology and sound? How does popular music speak to the 
volatility and indefiniteness of our current condition?



2. Waterways, mobilities, and cultural encounters

Fluidity also suggests movement and mobility. Waterways figure in songs 
as metaphors, while serving as important spaces for the development of 
musical styles or religious transformation. As historical sounds from 
“the Delta blues” to “the Black Atlantic” suggest, popular music has 
long traveled over oceans and rivers, connecting communities across 
continents even as cultural encounters yield new hybrid musical styles. 
Water can also isolate, challenging dreams of a return home for 
diasporic communities or fueling sentiments of insularity across the 
Atlantic, Indian, and Pacific oceans.



What sounds emerge when we take waterways as spaces of mobility or 
geographic foci, rather than land? What spaces of exchange or conflict 
open when we consider music (and culture) in motion, rather than located 
in discrete spaces? Papers might engage with transoceanic mobilities and 
diasporas, historically and in the present; sounds of crossings, 
hybridity, and friction; port cities as rich spaces of cultural 
exchange; and transformative experiences through water.



3. Ecology and embodiment

Water in its many forms, from ice to ocean to rain, is crucial for the 
ways in which humans live on and with earth. With glaciers melting, sea 
levels rising, and potable water supplies diminishing, this relationship 
is shifting in ways whose consequences are yet unknown. These changes 
reflect global interconnections, cycles, and flows of resources and 
energy that again affect people and sounds in diverse ways. While North 
American singer-songwriters coin songs about pressing environmental 
issues, elsewhere, indigenous peoples struggle to maintain rights to 
land and ways of life in the face of massive infrastructure projects or 
pollution, or are forced into exile as island homes are immersed by 
rising sea levels.



In considering relationships between music and environment, we might 
consider the human and nonhuman stakes of musical research. As the 
Anthropocene witnesses an ongoing wave of extinctions, climate change 
radically disrupts life, and clean fresh water becomes a scarce 
resource, how do musicians, audiences, and music researchers react? Do 
environmental crises call for a change in theory and method or are 
environmental exigencies merely a new set of questions to be dealt with 
in the same ways as past emphases? Papers taking up concerns of 
ecomusicology and of human/non-human relationships are especially welcome.



4. Sonic metaphors and materialities

The congruities between the materiality of sound and water as a medium 
are expressed in the terminology of acoustic science: sound waves, sound 
pressure, ultrasound, and so on. Air and water share the quality of 
being “immersive” (Helmreich) mediums, while techniques of “sounding” 
bring sonic technologies to bear on domains of communication, 
information, and mapping. More literally, water and its infrastructures 
are used to make music, and synthesizers are programmed to make “watery” 
sounds.



What do we learn from thinking across fluid materials and sound? How do 
congruities and incongruities between the two domains register, 
represent, or embody wider global flows? How are such materialities 
heard and felt in and through bodies? We hope this sub-theme will 
inspire a range of subjects related to materiality, from sonic ontology 
to the “matter” of voice and objects, as well as the ways in which water 
evokes literal, affective, or imagined meanings of music.



Deadline for proposals is Friday, November 15, 2013. Please submit 
proposals to (iaspmus2014 /at/ gmail.com). Proposals may be made in the 
following categories: (1) individual paper, (2) panel, or (3) 
alternative format. Specify in the subject heading of the email the 
category in which you are submitting.



(1) Individual presenters should submit a paper title, 250-word 
abstract, AV needs, and author information including full name, 
institutional affiliation, email address and a 50-word bio.

 (2) Panel proposals, specifying either 90 minutes (three presenters) 
or 120 (four), should include both 125-word overview and 250-word 
individual proposals (plus author information) as well as AV needs.

(3) Alternative format events may include lecture-demonstrations, 
round-tables, discussion of a pre-circulated text, or documentary film 
screenings. Proposals for alternative format events should stay within a 
2-hour timeframe. Send a 250-word overview, author information for all 
participants, and AV needs. The program committee reserves the right to 
adjust alternative events to suit the overall program needs.



Submissions should be attached as a single Word document. You will 
receive an email confirming receipt of your submission. All conference 
participants must be registered IASPM-US members. For membership 
information visit http://iaspm-us.net/membership/. For more information 
about the conference, go to http://iaspm-us.net/conferences/ or send 
email inquiries to Marina Peterson, program committee chair, at 
(petersom /at/ ohio.edu).



This year’s program committee consists of Jerome Camal (University of 
Wisconsin–Madison), Benjamin Court (UCLA), Mark Katz (University of 
North Carolina at Chapel Hill), Ali Colleen Neff (College of William & 
Mary), Josh Ottum (Ohio University), Mark Pedelty (University of 
Minnesota), and Marina Peterson (Ohio University).


Marina Peterson
Associate Professor
School of Interdisciplinary Arts
Ohio University
31 S. Court St, Room 068
Athens, Ohio 45701
(petersom /at/ ohio.edu)



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