Why do we scholars still need to attend conferences? In the digital age, it seems that the main aims of a conference can be attained without the long trips. We know the state of the art, the recent developments of our discipline, through journals and mailing lists. And a profuse communication through blogs, email and social networks provides us with an extended network of colleagues that inform us about job opportunities, informal information of various types and even some gossip.
But we are still sending proposals to conferences and these are still being organised. IASPM (the International Association for the Study of Popular Music) hold a biennial conference that tends to be multitudinous. The last one was organised in Gijón (Spain) by the University of Oviedo with the support of SIBE, the Spanish Society for Ethnomusicology. Nearly 250 papers were presented, but the Scientific Committee rejected nearly 150 proposals; still, most of the time there were seven parallel sessions running. Unsurprisingly, the best represented countries of origin were Spain and the rest of Europe, but there was a strong presence from both Brazil and Australia.
This is one of the outcomes that a conferences provides: a kind of a fixed photograph about where the disciplines are being developed, in which countries there are politics and resources to drive research, and where the impact of our field is increasing. Due of the large number of proposals presented, a Scientific Committee was established in order to help the Executive evaluate the quality of the papers. From my point of view, that was one of the reasons why the average level of papers presented was so good.
It is difficult to evaluate a massive conference like this one as a whole. Two different people could have attended a totally different conference, due to the number of parallel sessions. But I will try to give a panoramic view from the different perspectives I had during the conference: as a stream convenor, as a member of the organising team and as an attendant. One of the main differences between this conference and the previous ones has been the encouragement of panel proposals. That means that sessions are organised by the participants in advance instead of by the organising committee. The result should be that the topic of the session is more focused through some prior work by the participants: this format is designed to facilitate discussion above paper presentations. It promotes dialogue versus monologue. Although some of the panels kept to these guidelines and were used to display developments in collective work, most of the panels were no more than a series of papers with thematic coherence. In spite of this, panels still seem to be a way to provide focus in big conferences.
I would like to celebrate the success of the stream devoted to historical approaches to popular music. A remarkable number of papers on the topic were presented in Gijón, and most of them were able to remove the time barriers of what we consider ‘popular music’. Since rock and pop have been the core styles studied in the field, historical approaches have tended to focus on how these genres emerged. But a panoramic view of the papers presented in Gijón concludes that the historical scope is going further back in time, towards 19th-century music, and also that is strongly decentralised from the Anglo American perspective. We are reaching a complex point in popular music studies where the diversity of traditions and contexts is not only recognised but celebrated. We know now that to understand, for instance, the genealogy of Spanish popular music, blues is not as important as copla or zarzuela, and several papers were presented on this very matter.
At the opposite end, there was also a strong presence of papers focused on the contemporary context of popular music, relating technologies, practices, and legal and commercial regulations such as copyright. Although some of the items revisited are quite new, for instance crowdfunding, I consider that one of the strengths of these approaches lies in its capacity to tie the new and the old. For instance, the question of copyright afforded Chris Ballantine the opportunity to discuss how African traditional music is being inserted in the global fluxes, creating the necessity of cultural regulations in order to protect the patrimony of local communities.
Most papers presented at the conference were grounded in more traditional themes of the field: the relationship between music and collective identities, or the way in which music constructs a sense of time and place. But although these have been classical themes, methodological approaches have been changing. In previous IASPM conferences a kind of hermeneutic position was dominant, but in recent years anthropological perspectives seem to have gained presence. Most of the papers presented in Gijón were strongly based in case studies illuminated by ethnological methods: interviews, fieldwork, focus groups. It seems that in embracing the anthropological tradition, popular music studies have found a way to reinforce its scientific status, inserting itself directly in the domain of social science. In one way, popular music studies are drawing much closer to ethnomusicology: as an example, the Spanish branch of IASPM is now a working group of the broader SIBE Society for Ethnomusicology. At the same time, of course, ethnomusicology is becoming more involved in the study of popular music.
I started this article by questioning why scholars still attend conferences far from home. But I would also like to question why a local organisation or a university decides to invest its time, money and efforts to organise such a big event. For two years the colleagues of Universidad de Oviedo fought against a context of national economic crises in order to be able to host the conference in Gijón. They needed to convince university authorities and local politicians to invest money and resources in a conference while basic public services funds are being dramatically cut off. And an informal survey conducted at the end of the conference gave the impression that most of the attendants considered it a very good conference, both on the level of content and in the organisational matters: information, venue, logistics, equipment and social events.
The aim of the Spanish popular music studies community when we decided to organise this IASPM conference was to display the point at which Spanish popular music studies are right now, how extended our academic network is, how accurate our sources and our lines of research are: to display internationally the coming of age of popular music studies in Spain. In this regard, one of the most anticipated moments of the conference, at least for the national scholars, was the presentation of the volume Made in Spain, a collection of essays which aim to give an approach to the last century of Spanish popular music. This kind of collection is not available in Spanish, but from now on we have a tool to present not only Spanish music but also the work of local scholars to a worldwide readership.
Another objective was that the conference would function as a centripetal force in order to attract research teams and scholars who are working in the field but not involved in national academic organisations. The decision to organise the IASPM biennial conference in Gijón was not innocent. The city of Gijón is considered the cradle of Spanish indie music, much inspired by the experience of Seattle and grunge. It is a reference point for Spanish music.
Thus, there is a clear agenda behind deciding to organise a conference, and investing the time, effort and resources to do so. And, as I suggested in the first paragraph, there are good reasons to attend a conference. All of us are involved in a dramatic context in which educational and research funds are discussed while at the same time digital culture is providing us with tools to connect with colleagues and resources from all around the world. But there is still a place for personal meeting, for experiences that break our daily life and increase our understanding of the world and our involvement in it.
