The conference Música, ciudades, redes: creación musical e interacción social took place in Salamanca between 6–9 March 2008. It brought together the biennial conference of the Spanish Ethnomusicology Society (SIBE) with the Spanish branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM Spain), and the second conference of Popular Music of the Hispanic and Lusophone Worlds. The last of these was dedicated to the memory of the late Vanessa Knights, who with Ian Biddle coordinated the conference of that name held in Newcastle in 2006.

The Salamanca conference was a highpoint for popular music studies in Spain for several reasons. First, the sheer size of the event: both SIBE and IASPM Spain conferences have hitherto been small activities involving twenty to thirty presentations given by Spanish academic researchers and students. Salamanca saw almost 300 participants with presentations involving 150 researchers from twenty countries. Conference organisation was effected with the collaboration of the University of Newcastle, UK and the Instituto de Etnomusicología – Centro de Estudos em Musica e Dança (INET-MD) of the Universidade Nova of Lisbon, and without a doubt represents a big step towards the creation of a space of understanding between Spanish and Portuguese research traditions.

The second reason for this conference's impact in the field of popular music studies came from its format. The habitual conference format dominated by participants reading conference papers often in parrallel sessions is becoming increasingly critiqued as unsatisfactory. In Salamanca, while there were an ample number of such formal papers, the main part of the conference was devoted to thematic panels. This allowed groups of researchers working on common themes to present work in progress and exchange views in their field of interest, and it was noticeable how the dynamics and conclusions of each panel were different. With the support of SIBE through forums on its website, these working groups had been able to make preparations for the panel in the months prior to the conference, enabling the actual panels to focus on discussion rather than merely function as exhibition spaces for work.

At an academic level, the conference mapped new tendencies in the study of music and culture in Spain and internationally. For the first time, almost three decades after the end of their respective periods of dictatorships, the musical experiences of Spain and Portugal were tracked in the context of a contemporary scenario marked by terms like globalisation and world music. In this same global and intercultural context, the different diasporic dynamics that mark the modern musical experience were also examined. It appears this will be a rich field of study which in future will benefit from powerful bonds with Latin-American colleagues; as will the study of the body, another subject becoming central to popular music study.

Ethnomusicology and popular music research have come together in Spain under the umbrella of SIBE, with IASPM Spain constituted as a working group. However, in recent years, research on popular music has increased in comparison with that on folk or traditional musics. For this reason, a panel on Musical Heritage in the XXI Century focused on the necessity for new approaches to the study of folk music, drawing attention to the dangers of the fetishising of tradition which in recent years has arisen under the protection of globalised musical genres.

Issues around listening and methodologies for studying listening were the focus for two panels. For the first, the Barcelona group Ciudad Sonora (Sound City) considered the city as sonorous environment: beginning with musical forms, samples were used to create a new sound image of the city on the Web. For the second, Marta García Quiñones approached the subject by asking the question: What are we really listening to when we listen to music? Is it part of a vital experience, a conscious aesthetic experience, an element of implicit communication or like a cinema soundtrack?

International contributions linked with many of these preoccupations. The opening conference plenary was given by Iain Chambers who focused on the Mediterranean as a space where cultures rub against each other, with the interruptions of intercultural possibility and modernity. Ian Biddle, with the collaboration of Newcastle, UK colleagues and Anahid Kassabian, reviewed the role of musical memory in the construction of the city. Salwa el-Shawan Castelo Branco from Lisbon approached the question of power, representation and action in popular music.

An overall view of papers presented revealed the following subjects as relevant to present research preoccupations: (i) local and specialised scenes; (ii) music and new audio-visual developments; and related to this, (iii) the complex role of the music industry in the contemporary context of change and uncertainty. While these are undoubtedly central to the study of popular music at an international level, analysis from the point of view of the reality of Spanish academia allows one to note another development: the widening of the base of those carrying out research in music and culture. As well as in ethnomusicology, there are an increasing number of researchers in the fields of communication, sociology and the humanities coming to these conferences.

Without overdoing the spirit of celebration, I believe that this conference served once and for all to liberate Spanish academics from a certain inferiority complex vis à vis the international context. It is true that there is still a sharp contrast between the intellectual dynamism of the field and the complicated professional and institutional position of popular music studies in the Spanish academy, but the objects of study, theoretical approaches and methodological references presented at the conference were totally embedded in intellectual preoccupations shared with colleagues from outside Spain. As a result, this begins to create, even tentatively, new geopolitical spaces for the study of popular music, widening to embrace traditions of study in Portugal and Latin America in the context of the complexity of music at this historical point in time. It is this vision of the future that in the long term will be the most important legacy of the four days of discussion and exchange in Salamanca.