Urban Music Studies

Call for papers

It is almost twenty years since the publication of the landmark text ‘The Place of Music’ (Leyshon et al. 1998) put the complex relationships between music and place firmly on the research agenda. In those twenty years, technological developments have profoundly impacted upon musical production and consumption in ways which have not only changed the relationships between music and place in a geographical sense, but the place of music in society and the economy more fundamentally.
Our aim is to bring together researchers from diverse disciplinary backgrounds who share common ground through their interest in music scholarship. We therefore invite proposals for presentations from scholars working in any discipline or area of music scholarship.

For the 2017 DGS Sociology of Arts meeting in Berlin, we invite papers researching the ways that cities shape art at different levels. The goal of this event is to share research and invoke dialogues about the ways that the urban is important for understanding the production, evaluation and distribution of art.

Our aim is to develop an arts sociology that takes seriously place, space and cities.
There are numerous collectively shared ideas about the importance of cities in art. Social scientists, historians and journalists alike envision particular cities in particular historical moments as key sites where the arts are flourishing, since at least the 20th century cities have been part of the collective imaginary of where art is produced, evaluated and distributed. Examples are legion: from the emergence of new forms and avant-garde art, such as literature or visual arts in pre-war Paris, to popular music in 1980-90s Manchester, or the visual arts in New York City and Berlin and film in Los Angeles and Mumbai today.