“Home, Work and Music: Musical Practices in Domestic Spaces”
Conference
22 – 23 February 2024
mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, Fanny Hensel-Hall
Call for Papers
What does it mean to make and perform music in the home? Home, Work and Music explores issues and debates centred around music in domestic spaces. It will showcase current research on the empirical, methodological and theoretical implications of centring the domestic in music research.
Domestic spaces are regularly overlooked in scholarly, sectoral and policy discourses, but their significance as entangled sites of music creation and performance, and the issues raised by their visibility are striking and urgent. From basements to bedrooms, domestic settings are key nodal points where personal lives, global digital infrastructures and creative networks meet. Scrutiny of the lived realities of these digitally porous sites affords critical insights into technological mediations of musicians’ creative labour in the home.
The conference aims to illuminate practices of music production as bound to lived domestic sites against a backdrop of wholesale changes to music associated with digitalisation, entrepreneurialism and self-marketisation. We encourage submissions that investigate the home as the location for individual and collective music production at a moment when the boundaries of the public and private are eroding and the pressures on musicians as creative workers are intensifying as a result of longer-term patterns of participation, exclusion and “flexibilisation”.
We welcome critical explorations from various disciplines of the experiences of musicians that consider the following topics:
– Live music performance from/in the home
– Music and domestic material spaces: bedrooms, garages, bathrooms, sheds, basements
– Housing provision, welfare and the creative process
– Gendered and racialized inequalities in making time and space for music
– New and innovative methodologies in domestic music making
– Stylistic and genre developments, such as bedroom pop
– The politics of music and domesticity: resistance, safety and inequalities
– Domestic technologies, bodies and musicking
– Digitalisation, networking and collective music making
– Covid-19, the live sector and domestic performance
– Neoliberal self-marketisation and the creative autonomy of musicians
We would particularly welcome contributions that highlight power relations with respect to gender, class, sexuality, disability and race/ethnicity.
We are currently putting together a special issue proposal on “Music Practices in Domestic Spaces” (guest editors Rosa Reitsamer, Emília Barna, Ingrid Tolstad, Paul Harkins and Nick Prior) that will be linked to the conference.
Guide for authors
The deadline to submit abstracts is: 31st August 2023
To be considered for the conference, please write an abstract of no more than 250 words and submit it to:
muscids2024@gmail.com
Please include: your name and affiliation, your email address and please note if you would like your abstract to be considered for the special issue.
The conference is free and while we are gently encouraging an in-person conference presenting online is also a possibility. Please specify in your abstract submission your preference.
Important Dates
Deadline for submission: 31st August, 2023
Notification of acceptance: 30th September, 2023
Further information on the final paper submission for the special issue will be announced on the conference website by October 2023.
Organising committee
The conference is organized by a group of renowned international scholars and hosted by the Department of Music Sociology
at mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna:
Emília Barna, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary
Ingrid Tolstad, Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway
Paul Harkins, Edinburgh Napier University, UK
Rosa Reitsamer, University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna, Austria
Nick Prior, University of Edinburgh, UK
For any enquiries regarding the programme and submissions, please contact: muscids2024@gmail.com
We look forward to seeing you in Vienna at Homework: Musical Practices in Domestic Spaces