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Volatile Frequencies: Topologies of Authority, Technology and Production in Contemporary Middle Eastern Music Practices


A call for papers and performances
 
City University London Post-graduate Conference on 18th November 2010, funded by City University London and LCACE (London Centre for Arts and Cultural Exchange).


What kind of diverse practices might constitute an experimental Middle Eastern music? Are there points of relation to the regional orthodoxies? Is such a framing of new work relevant? Halim el Dabh, Ali Reza Mashayekhi, Muslimgauze, Mazen Kerbaj, Hassan Khan - new practitioners operate at the interface of cultural heritage and possible futures and an initial survey reveals a vibrant practice, emergent especially over the past ten years in centres such as Cairo and Beirut.
 

The Volatile Frequencies conference seeks to collate research that translates, mediates and frames practices specific to sonic disciplines (music, sound art, musicology) arising in relation to the Middle East and North Africa, and to critically connect with wider academic currents. It will emphasize current post-graduate research and scholarly approaches. A number of relevant contextualising works include the forthcoming The Arab Avantgarde edited by Thomas Burkhalter, Kay Dickinson and Ben Harbert, Steven Goodman's Sonic Warfare, John Hutnyk's Critique of Exotica and Laudan Nooshin's Music and the Play of Power in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia. The day proposes to formulate understandings and critical hearings of the debates within and without the region in relation to new sonic practices, prioritising practice that favours experimental and exploratory approaches.
 

Volatile Frequencies will be in conjunction with the first edition of the MazaJ Festival of Experimental Middle Eastern Music; the programme includes an artist residency, a week of concerts and a second day of discussion hosted by The Wire Magazine as part of their Salon series. The salon will act in counter-point with the post-graduate day; providing a contrast to, but also a potential meeting point of scholarly with journalistic approaches. The MazaJ festival is co-produced by Zenith Foundation, Sound and Music, and The Wire Magazine.
 

The two days of exchange aim to offer an erudite appraisal of the area, and is international in the scope of participating academics, and practitioners.
 

Scholars and artists are invited to submit proposals for the Volatile Frequencies Post-graduate day, addressing the following themes (as well as other themes that fit in with the conference profile). Possible key issues to be addressed are:

Production
	• Collaboration and improvisation have been central modes of musicking; Improvisation is a temporal unfolding that potentially constructs new cartographies not merely reiterating those inherited. How are current practices producing new maps? In what ways do these productions relate to the wider politics of bordered and patrolled time/spaces?
	• What are the points of relation with the regional heritages? Diaspora and syncretism will be explored. How has dispersion and globalization / delocalization influenced practices?


Technology
	• The complex regional response to technologies can be thought double-edged, simultaneously a useful means of production, but also of material and cultural dissolution.
	• How have changes in accessible technologies contributed to innovation, production and dissemination?


Power:
	• What can these new sonic bodies do?
	• Current practitioners appear to arise from communities of collaboration. What functions do these assemblages perform?
	• Themes of authority, censorship, resistance and response to geopolitical contexts. If not simply ‘withstanding’ and ‘surviving’ within a pre-set mapping system, new, itinerant topologies may arise.
	• The rise of an international market has tended to confine regional musicianship to the category of ‘world music’. How does practice fare that does not conform to, or is in critical relation to, such understandings?


The conference welcomes proposals for:
 
	• Papers (20 minutes maximum, with 10 minutes discussion).
	• Demo/lecture/performance sessions (30 minutes maximum, with 15 minutes discussion).


Proposals should be a maximum of 300 words and should include (1) name and affiliation of the participant, (2) the title of the presentation, (3) information regarding any equipment required and (4) a brief biographical statement.

Please submit proposals by email to conference organiser Seth Ayyaz at s.a.bhunnoo [at] city.ac.uk <http://city.ac.uk/> . The deadline for the submission of abstracts is Sunday 15th August 2010.
 

The proposals will be peer-reviewed anonymously. Successful contributors will be notified via email by late August 2010. Final papers are to be submitted  by Sunday 3rd October 2010. Papers will be automatically considered for on-line publication as part of the conference proceedings.
 

The conference site is City University London, Department of Music, School of Arts, Northampton Square, London, EC1V 0HB.
 
Two bursaries of £200 towards travel and expenses have been made available by the LCACE funding. Priority will be given to participants travelling from the North Africa and Middle East region, and then consideration will be given to those from outside the Greater London area. If you would like to be considered, then please let us know when you submit your abstract, detailing your circumstances and reasons why you wish to be considered.
 

For further information please contact: Seth Ayyaz at s.a.bhunnoo [at] city.ac.uk <http://city.ac.uk/>  or  visit http://www.zenithfoundation.com/conference2010.  

****End of forwarded message**** 

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Dr J. P. E. Harper-Scott
Senior Lecturer
Department of Music
Royal Holloway, University of London
http://web.me.com/jpehs/
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