Some colleagues may be interested, from Ian Russell:

I would like to draw your attention to three key lectures, which are part of our AHRC Networking project – the first in Aberdeen, the second in Glasgow and the third in Newcastle. Abstracts and speakers’ biographies are given below and attached.
I hope they are of interest. Please will you help us to publicise the lectures and circulate the notice widely.
With best wishes
Ian
 
Memory, Music and Movement
An AHRC-North Atlantic Fiddle Convention (NAFCo) Networking Project
 
The Elphinstone Institute of the University of Aberdeen in partnership with Cape Breton University present three public lectures:
 
Tuesday 24 October 2017, 7.30pm
University of Aberdeen (Taylor Building, King’s College AB24 3UB, Room A21)
‘Music and the Memory Spectrum’, Michael Pickering
 
Wednesday 15 November, 5.15pm
University of Glasgow (14 University Gardens, Glasgow G12 8QH, Room 2)
‘Prolegomena to Practice-Based Research in Traditional Music’, Simon McKerrell
 
Wednesday 6 December 2017, 4.00pm
Newcastle University, the International Centre for Music Studies (ICMuS, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU)
‘Bass Culture in Scottish Fiddle Music from 1750’, David McGuinness
 
Abstracts and Biographies
‘Music and the Memory Spectrum’, Michael Pickering
Music is a potent component of remembering.  It works either as an unchosen catalyst, stirring up unbidden memories as a tune is fortuitously heard, or as a chosen vehicle serving as an intentional carrier of people’s remembered experience of significant moments or occasions in their lives, as for instance in the widespread ascription of ‘our song’ in intimate relationships.  This talk will map out the major ways in which music figures in registering and referencing the past, both in autobiographical memory and in vernacular memory.  It will also outline and discuss the fieldwork-based research that has provided the main body of data drawn on in the trilogy The Mnemonic Imagination, Photography, Music and Memory, and Memory and the Management of Change, co-written with Emily Keightley.  The main concept in this work is the mnemonic imagination, and this too will be brought into the talk and its value explained.
 
Michael Pickering is Emeritus Professor in the Department of Social Sciences at Loughborough University.  He has published in the areas of social and cultural history, the sociology of art and culture, and media and communication studies. His recent books include Creativity, Communication and Cultural Value, 2004 (with Keith Negus); Beyond a Joke: The Limits of Humour, 2005/2009 (with Sharon Lockyer); Researching Communications, 1999/2007/2018 (with David Deacon, Peter Golding and Graham Murdock); Blackface Minstrelsy in Britain, 2008/2016; Research Methods for Cultural Studies (2008); Popular Culture, a four-volume edited collection (2010); The Mnemonic Imagination: Remembering as Creative Practice, 2012 (with Emily Keightley); Rhythms of Labour: Music at Work in Britain, 2013 (with Marek Korczynski and Emma Robertson); Research Methods for Memory Studies, 2013 (with Emily Keightley); Colonial Advertising and Commodity Racism, 2013 (with Wulf D. Hund and Anandi Ramamurthy), and Photography, Music and Memory (with Emily Keightley). His major research project with Emily Keightley on media and memory was funded by the Leverhulme Trust.
 
‘Prolegomena to Practice-Based Research in Traditional Music’, Simon McKerrell
The issue of musical practice and the sonic aspects of music themselves have re-asserted their musicological importance in recent years. This new re-emergence of sound and practice began in the early music community, spread to the art music community in the early noughties and gradually into the canon of scholarship on popular music studies. Ethnomusicology, since its inception in the 1950s, has however privileged the practice of traditional music, bimusicality and embodied forms of performative knowledge as part of the discipline. Arguably however, this focus has tended to be a vehicle for the real object of ethnomusicological scholarship—the social life and structure of communities. This paper surveys the epistemological scholarship of practice in traditional music since the 1950s to today and makes an argument for adapting a relational and socially constructivist position on traditional music practice as the place of meaning construction through the adoption of an intersubjective approach. I argue that this is a much stronger position to ground theoretical practice based research for traditional music, rather than following the phenomenological lead from art music, artistic practice research or sound studies. A socially constructivist practice based research rests upon on a set of shared intersubjective symbolic meanings, rejecting the myopic singularity of phenomenological ways of knowing, and better suits traditional music because of the centrality of a social (and changing) symbolic historicism at the core of traditional music. This puts the theoretical emphasis more firmly on communal performative values and shared symbolic meanings, which is more epistemologically congruent with the emphasis on communitas and relativism at the heart of ethnomusicological approaches to traditional music around the world.
Dr Simon McKerrell is interested in the social impact of traditional music and the creative industries. His research largely focuses upon the communicative power of music as heritage, social conflict and multimodality, and how these relate to policy. He is the author of Focus: Scottish Traditional Music (Routledge), and the Co-Editor of both Music as Multimodal Discourse: Media, Power and Protest (Bloomsbury) and Understanding Scotland Musically: Folk, Tradition, Modernity (Routledge). He is Associate Dean for Research & Innovation at Newcastle University, having previously held positions at the Universities of Sheffield, Glasgow and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, and The National Piping Centre in Glasgow. He is currently Co-I on the EU funded international research project Critical Heritages (CoHERE): performing and representing Identities in Europe (2.5€ million), in 2014-15 he was PI for the AHRC project Understanding Scotland Musically (£68,000) and was concurrently a Co-Investigator for a Scottish Government Social Research project entitled Community Experiences of Sectarianism (£73,000). In 2016, along with Dr Simon Keegan-Phipps (Sheffield) he was the founding Co-Editor of The International Journal of Traditional Arts (www.tradartsjournal.org). In addition to this, Simon is an expert performer of Highland and Uilleann bagpiping, having recorded 11 commercial albums and taught throughout the world.
 
‘Bass Culture in Scottish Fiddle Music from 1750’, David McGuinness
Writers in pop songwriting teams can find themselves categorised either as topline (melody and lyrics) or as production (arrangement and grooves), with a smaller group of composers who successfully do both. In traditional music in Britain, it is generally only the topline which receives serious consideration from scholars, and which is considered to carry the ‘traditional’ content. Instead, this paper traces bass traditions in Scottish fiddle music through written and printed sources and into the recording era, and it observes the interaction of these traditions with those of the topline.
David McGuinness divides his time between historical Scottish music and contemporary work. As director of early music ensemble Concerto Caledonia he has made thirteen albums, mostly of newly-rediscovered repertoire, and has been a music producer and composer for television and radio, most notably on several seasons of E4’s teen drama series Skins. In 2007 he produced John Purser’s 50-part history of Scotland’s music for BBC Radio Scotland, and co-ordinated the station’s observance of No Music Day with the artist Bill Drummond. From 2012 to 2015 he was principal investigator on the AHRC-funded project Bass Culture in Scottish Musical Traditions, and from 2018 he will be music editor of the Edinburgh Allan Ramsay edition, also funded by the AHRC. In Spring 2018, Drag City will release What News, an album of traditional ballads made in collaboration with singer Alasdair Roberts and electroacoustic composer Amble Skuse. David is a Senior Lecturer in music at the University of Glasgow.
 
 
___________________________
Ian Russell, Professor Emeritus 
The Elphinstone Institute 
University of Aberdeen