IASPM Research Seminars in February and March

Dear Colleagues,

There are a few things to announce about the IASPM Monthly Online Research Seminars.

Firstly, in order to allow us to properly record the seminars, and also to allow for live streaming, and co-ordination with ticket booking on Eventbrite, we have purchased an IASPM Zoom account. This “Pro” account, allows for there to be 100 people taking part actively in the seminar (with chat functions etc.), so each research seminar will have 100 tickets, on Eventbrite, which is a ticketing website. If these tickets are sold, we hope to stream the event on YouTube or Facebook, which will mean any number of people can at least watch the seminar. The seminars will be available to anyone, not just to IASPM members, so please advertise them far and wide, including to postgrad and graduate students, and on any email lists you know.  We will also record and publish all seminars.

You can look on the IASPM YouTube channel for the live streams of the research seminars at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCii1IhY4vnGskTwf3GUyhjQ

You will find there a video of the January seminar featuring IASPM ANZ. I’m afraid this features crackle on the audio, despite doing considerable denoising. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1Srj75nsOE. Also on YouTube is the video from Matt Brennan’s December talk https://youtu.be/frcAEg3Tz1Q. Hopefully we will archive all the talks on the IASPM YouTube page.

The IASPM Zoom account is available to all branches to use for events such as conferences or seminars. I can set up a Zoom event, and co-ordinate this with you. If you are arranging a popular music related event, are an IASPM member, and wish to jointly arrange your event with IASPM, you could also take advantage of this facility. We have this account and want to develop a range of IASPM research events online for members, and are offering this facility. I don’t know how this will work out, but do get in touch if needed. Working with IASPM on your event also means the video of it can be streamed on the IASPM YouTube channel (which we hope will become the go-to home of popular music academic video), and it can be advertised by IASPM. Anyway, we hope that might be useful for some of you, please get in touch with me if you want to propose an online event.

See below for details of the IASPM research seminars on 17 February (hosted by the South East Asia branch) and 25 March (by the Norden branch).

Please note that there is now a link to the IASPM South East Asia (SEA) branch on the IASPM website https://www.iaspm.net. Details of the two seminars can be seen below.

Please do let me know if you experience any issues with booking or attending seminars. I believe that some people tried to attend the last event at the wrong time, please check your local time zone time. This is all a little new to us, so please bear with us.

Many thanks

Professor Rupert Till

IASPM Chair.

IASPM Research Seminar February

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/iaspm-february-online-research-seminar-tickets-139823561035

Wed, February 17, 2021

21:00 – 22:00 Kuala Lumpur time; 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM GMT; Midnight for Sydney; 08:00 in New York

ADIL Johan will present the February IASPM Online Research Seminar, which is hosted by the IASPM South East Asia (SEA) branch, on the subject of “Conceptualising an Intimately Connected Nusantara: The Rock Kapak Phenomenon of the 1980s and 1990s”.

Malay rock & roll circulated in Singapore, Malaysia and Indonesia as early as the 1960s and flourished from the 1970s onwards to the 1990s. Inter-regional music exchanges were frequent across national borders. The Singaporean band Sweet Charity’s hit song “Kamelia”, released in 1980, was a cover of Indonesian singer-songwriter Ebiet G. Ade’s song “Camelia 2”. In 1989, the Malaysian glam metal band, Search, achieved a feat rarely achieved by their counterparts by breaking into the Indonesian popular music market, selling over one million units of their album Fenomena. Following that, they became a popular culture phenomenon in Indonesia, successfully exporting the Malaysian brand of glam metal colloquially termed rock kapak (lit. “axe rock”) across the region. Their success set the stage for further inter-Nusantara collaboration, such as a feature-length film titled Isabella (1990), that starred the band members and was shot, produced and released in Indonesia. Through a historiographical exploration of rock in the region, I hope to reveal how analysing popular music in an intimately connected Malay world offers an epistemological means to conceptualize the ‘Nusantara’ as a maritime space of fluid identities, affinities and contestations. Listening to Malay rock kapak as a regional phenomenon also unearths the intercultural intimacies of Nusantara youth in an increasingly urbanised and globalised context, rooted to local expressions of sentimentality and narrations of the social anxieties experienced in a period of rapid economic development during the 1980s and 1990s. 

Keywords: Rock Kapak; Glam Metal; Malay world; Nusantara; intercultural intimacies 

ADIL Johan is a Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer at the Institute for Ethnic Studies, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia. His research analyses aspects of popular music in the mass media that intersect with issues of interculturalism, cosmopolitanism, intimacy, affect and gender, focussing on the Malay world and Southeast Asia. His recent publications include: Cosmopolitan intimacies: Malay film music of the independence era (NUS Press, 2018); “Cosmopolitan intimacies in Malay performing arts and literature: An introduction” (Special Section Editor), Journal of Intercultural Studies 40(4) (2019); and “Malaysian popular music and social cohesion”, Kajian Malaysia 37(2) (2019). He is also co-editor for the volume, Made in Nusantara: Studies in popular music (Routledge, 2021). He recently collaborated with the Cultural Economy Development Agency (CENDANA) to produce Malaysia’s first Klang Valley Independent Music Ecosystem Map. He performs and records as a saxophonist for Azmyl Yunor Orkes Padu and Nadir.

IASPM Research Seminar March 2021

https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/iaspm-march-research-seminar-tickets-132390330041

Organised by IASPM Norden, with speaker Thomas Hilder of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology

25th March 2021, 18:00 CET, IASPM Norden,

https://www.ntnu.edu/employees/thomas.r.hilder

Transgressive Pedagogies in the Musicological Classroom

“The classroom remains the most radical space of possibility in the academy,” according to eminent feminist scholar bell hooks (1994: 12). How, thus, do we harness the potential of the classroom in our role as music educators, public intellectuals, and cultural advocates? In this presentation, I share stories of my own experiences of teaching at NTNU and my aspiration toward hooks’ notion of transgressive pedagogy (1994). What curricula and teaching materials connect with today’s students? How can the activities and pedagogical strategies we employ create transformative spaces? What are the practical and ethical challenges and potentials we encounter in the musicological classroom? My discussion addresses debates on decolonising academia, mental health pandemics, and the neoliberalisation of the university. Drawing on critical feminist, queer, and anti-racist pedagogies, I hope to pose pressing questions about what it means to be a music scholar in the 21st century.