The 2013 conference of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) was hosted by the University of Oviedo and located at the impressive Laboral Ciudad de la Cultura, outside the city centre of Gijón in northern Spain, which reflected the importance of the Spanish-speaking IASPM branches and a growing field of study within this cultural area. Consequently, conference papers were presented in both English and Spanish, which unfortunately resulted sometimes in a minor division between Spanish- and English-speaking participants. Yet, the biennial conference contributed once again – as expressed in its title – towards bridging the gap between different disciplines, perspectives and cultural contexts within popular music studies.
According to the conference coordinator, Eduardo Viñuela, some 300 out of 500 submitted papers were accepted, including four internationally renowned keynote speakers. Generally speaking, the papers were presented during the course of seven parallel sessions, and several plenary sessions were held at the venue's huge theatre. Some topically related papers were grouped into panels such as ‘Singing Styles in US-American Popular Music before 1950’, chaired by Martin Pfleiderer. Unfortunately, last-minute cancellations and programme changes meant that panel-hopping was often frustrating. The conference fee of €220/180 covered all lunches and coffee breaks during the week. In addition, some popular music-related films were shown during lunch times (including Buenos Aires por la capital: Tanguerías en Santiago de Chile; Spontaneous Lux: Freestyling in Dance and Music; Movin’ On Up: The Music and Message of Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions and Non morirà mai: el tango italiano en cuatro movimientos).
The academic schedule was accompanied by a cultural programme and opened with a ‘cocktail reception’ hosted by Popular Music on Monday night, where members of the editorial board took the opportunity to encourage authors from non-English cultural backgrounds to submit their academic work which has not yet been published in English. A typical but outstanding ‘Espicha’ dinner was served on Thursday night, which consisted of traditional bagpipe music, finger food and local ‘Sidra’ drinks.
The first academic highlight on Monday was the opening keynote address by Simon Frith – who will retire at the end of this academic year – in which he looked back on his Performing Rites (1996). The first plenary session was opened by Barbara Bradby, who opened her presentation on ‘The Globalisation of Andean Water Ceremonies’ in Ayacucho (Peru) with a short tribute to the life of Jan Fairley and her important role in IASPM. The session was closed by Eric James Haanstad who focused on Thailand's number one Beatles Tribute Band (The Better) which performs every Friday night at O’Reilly's Club in Bangkok's Patpong district. The expertise of Asian musicians within the field of Western popular music was also emphasised in other papers. Lee William Watkins, for instance, reported on ‘Migrant Filipino Musicians in Hong Kong’.
The title of Tuesday's plenary was Under the Bridge. Here, Liz Giuffre's paper on ‘The Wiggles: Australia's Most Popular Unpopular Musical Export’ stood out. On the same panel, Kai Fikentscher presented a paper on ‘Music Programming in Contemporary DJ Culture’, based on his contribution to the recent volume DJ Culture in the Mix (Bloomsbury), edited by Bernardo Alexander Attias, Anna Gavanas and Hillegonda Rietveld. Further book launches included Made in Spain (Routledge), edited by Sílvia Martínez and Héctour Fouce, and containing new articles on Spanish popular music by Franco Fabbri, Goffredo Plastino, Martha Ulhôa and others; Motti Regev's Pop-Rock Music: Aesthetic Cosmopolitanism in Late Modernity (Polity); and Ubiquitous Musics: The Everyday Sounds That We Don’t Always Notice (Ashgate), edited by Marta García Quiñones, Anahid Kassaabian and Elena Boschi. And finally, John Richardson, Kari Kallioniemi and Kimi Kärki from the University of Turku presented their department, the International Institute of Popular Culture, at a special launch on Tuesday night.
Making their debut at the IASPM conference, the Poster Presentations were held on Wednesday in the Theatre Hall, followed by Bruce Johnson's keynote lecture ‘No Cogitation Without Representation: Gesture and Cognition in Early Jazz’. In the afternoon, Martin Cloonan and John Williamson presented their new research project on the British Musicians’ Union (MU), which played a key – but so far under-researched – role in British musical life. The results of this research, which is funded by the AHRC and ESRC for four years, will be highlighted at a conference in Glasgow in 2016.
Looking at Britain, Sini Timonen rediscovered the almost forgotten beat group Mandy and the Girlfriends (1965–1968) and managed to show some parallels to their male counterparts (The Beatles), including concert trips to Germany. At the same session, Marcelo Boccato Kuyumjian focused on the particularities of the Brazilian genre of Samba Jazz and its musicians as ‘cultural mediators’, while Ayhan Erol took a new look at the genre of Arabesk music in Turkey. As Erol pointed out, the word ‘Arabesk’ originally stood for the imitation of Arabian music and has had a negative connotation in Turkey since the 1930s. Yet the ban on Arabesk music has slowly been withdrawn since the 1980s and the genre now has gained new popularity, even among some rock bands, which cover songs by famous Arabesk musicians like Orhan Gencebay. The IASPM General Meeting on Thursday showed that although some national branches (e.g. Portugal) have disbanded, others like the German-speaking branch (D-A-CH) have been recently renewed. As a result, overall IASPM is constantly growing. The next international conference will be held in Campinas (Brazil) at UNICAMP. The desire to host one of the forthcoming conferences was expressed by Catherine Rudent (Université Sorbonne, Paris) and Jan Hemming (Universität Kassel, Germany).
Topics related to different influences in French popular music were discussed in a session chaired by Isabelle Marc on Friday afternoon. Olivier Julien began by taking a closer look at the work of Serge Gainsbourg and his role as a mediator between French high culture and mass audiences. Julien emphasised the point that Gainsbourg's work has also been influenced by European art music. The song ‘Jane B.,’ for example, is based on Chopin's Prelude for Piano in E minor (Op. 28, No. 4), which was also mentioned on the album cover. On the other hand, Gainsbourg hid influences from Beethoven in songs like ‘Ma Lou Marilou’. Catherine Rudent looked at the influences of Anglo-Saxon music in the work of French artists like Johnny Hallyday and Eddy Mitchell. Finally, she focused on the songs ‘Le téléphone pleure’ and ‘Alexandrie Alexandra’ from Claude François. Rudent pointed out that although neither song was a real cover version, they both heavily borrowed musical elements from contemporary US hits like ‘Telephone Call’ by George and Tammy, ‘Get on the Floor’ by Michael Jackson and ‘Going to My Roots’ by Lamont Dozier. Sara Cohen and Francisco Cruces gave the final keynote lectures on Friday. While Cohen presented some more examples of her research project, ‘Mapping Music and Urban Change in Liverpool’, which she had introduced at the 2009 IASPM conference in Liverpool, Cruces referred directly to Cohen's research and tried to expand the geographic view of popular music from Liverpool to the Spanish capital of Madrid.
Finally, participants and organisers enjoyed a positive conclusion to the 2013 event in Gijón at the closing session, though Martha Ulhôa's proposal to limit the number of conference days at future conferences met with protest from the floor. The official conference closure was followed by an unofficial and spontaneous closure that evening when delegates sang ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, accompanied by Francisco Cruces, Liam Maloy and other delegates outside a bar in the city centre of Gijón. This musical experience strengthened the idea that in the future, more – or at least one – musical session should be hosted by the conference participants themselves. Unfortunately, local DJs and bands (Mar Álvarez, La Cosa Nostra and Xota Pa Tres) did not always receive the attention they deserved, despite their musical commitment and qualities; however, this was mostly due to networking activities and general fatigue after a long conference day. Finally, it should also be mentioned that the conference took place in the shadow of a Bruce Springsteen concert in Gijón on the Wednesday night, which led to somewhat elevated hotel prices on that day. But in general, the industrial town of Gijón and the ‘Laboral’ were very good choices to host a conference like this, not only because of the fair pricing of the city, but also because of the friendly reception of popular music scholars from all over the world. ¡Gracias Gijón!
