Start blog cfp: Nocturnes – Popular Music and the Night

cfp: Nocturnes – Popular Music and the Night

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Call for Chapter Proposals: Nocturnes: Popular Music and the Night

»After midnight, we’re gonna let it all hang out
 – After midnight, we’re gonna chug-a-lug and shout
 – We’re gonna cause talk and suspicion
 – Give an exhibition
 – Find out what it is all about«

JJ Cale, “After Midnight”

 

»I go out walkin’ after midnight
 – Out in the starlight, just hoping you may be
 – Somewhere a-walkin’ after midnight
 – Searchin’ for me«

Patsy Cline, “Walking After Midnight”

Consuming and performing popular music is as connected to the night as 
sleeping, street cleaning, patrolling, having sex, delivering milk or 
baking bread. However, the relationship between the night and popular 
music has long served to energise both, such that they are tightly bound 
together as trope and topos. This long history of reciprocity has 
produced a range of resonant and compelling imaginaries, conjured up 
through countless songs and spaces dedicated to life after dark. 
Singers, songwriters and DJs have described it as a locus for 
inspiration and energy but also a source of mystery, anxiety, nightmares 
and terror. Pub, café and club visitors, among many others, have drawn 
on the night as an opportunity for liberation and exploration, as well 
as an instrument to experiment with alternative identities. By contrast, 
policy makers and politicians have often seen the night as an experience 
to repress, limit and coerce or to be commodified into something ‘that 
never sleeps.’ The problems, promises, and paradoxes of the night and 
music play off of one another to produce spaces of solace and sanctuary 
as well as underpinning strategies designed to police, surveil and 
control movements and bodies of all sorts.

Sounding out silhouettes and shadows, between the midnight choir and the 
dawn chorus, the rich connections found between the night and popular 
music offer a number of opportunities for scholarly engagement. This 
collection aims to provide as wide a sampling as possible of topics 
exploring the relationship between night and popular music. We are 
soliciting papers that can speak to the night and popular music, and 
encourage papers that look at historical as well as contemporary 
examples.

Proposals may touch or expand upon any of the following areas, 
but we also strongly encourage submissions that venture beyond these:

  • Night Moves: Policing, policy, politics and urban/suburban spaces
  • Dancing in the Dark: Music, performance, and sociality at night
  • Round Midnight: Lyrics, songs, and albums after dark
  • Night Beat: Soundtracking the cinematic city at night
  • Dusk ’til Dawn: Gender and sexuality in silhouetted soundscapes

Abstracts of up to 250 words can be sent to: nocturnesbook@gmail.com no later than December 1st, 2016. 
Please include a selection of 3-5 keywords, and include a brief bio, of 
no more than 150 words.

Editors: Giacomo Bottà and Geoff Stahl

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via www.theurbannight.com

Vorheriger ArtikelSTADT NACH ACHT // conference // November 2016
Nächster ArtikelVergleichsstudie Berlin – Mailand

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