Music of changes: The concept of music-in-action

SocArts is arranging a one day symposium on the 18th May 2009 with speakers from SocArts as well as invited guest speakers.

Recent developments in music sociology have highlighted music’s role as an agent of change. These developments have included concepts such as: mediation, affordance, performativity, music as exemplar, tacit practices, grounded aesthetics, music as technology of self/health, music as politics, and musically inflected space. On the one hand this work has been at the forefront of the so-called ‘Strong Program’ of Cultural Sociology. On other hand, it has interacted and taken inspiration from concurrent developments in applied areas of musical practice – music therapy and community music activism, for example, where ‘change’ is often actively sought. This day symposium will bring practitioners and researchers together to consider music’s dynamic role in social life and to develop theoretical perspectives on culture and agency, arts in action.

Full program below.

10.15 Amory Building Room 310, Welcome (Tia DeNora, Exeter, SocArts)

10.30-11.30 Amplifying togetherness, diminishing difference, 1 - identity (Ian Sutherland, Chair):

Arild Bergh, Exeter SocArts: Can't stop the music: Music and interruption in conflict transformation

Craig Robertson, Exeter SocArts: The Ethnographic Musician: Relationships between Music Sociology, Ethnography and Conflict Transformation

Pedro dos Santos Boia, Exeter SocArts, The viola monologues: musical technologies into social identities and vice versa

11.30-11.45 Coffee

 11.45-12.45 Amplifying togetherness, diminishing difference, 2 – health and well-being (Mariko Hara, Chair):

Simon Procter, Nordoff Robbins Centre for Music Therapy/Exeter SocArts: Community Music in a Hospice Setting (http://www.nordoff-robbins.org.uk/musicTherapy/research/ourResearchers.html )

Susan Trythall, Exeter SocArts: ‘People not Patients’: an ethnography of Music in Hospitals (http://www.music-in-hospitals.org.uk/ )

Adrian Bull, Soundwaves, Exeter (Learning Disability): The soundwaves project

12.45-2.00 Lunch

xFi Seminar Room C 2.00-2.45 Amplifying togetherness, diminishing difference, 3 – health and wellbeing (Simon Procter, Chair)

Jean Usher, Alzheimer’s Society: Singing for the Brain, a music leader’s perspective, Exeter (Dementia)

Mariko Hara, Exeter SocArts: Using music to create a caring community -  Participant observation with 'Singing for the Brain' 

2.45-3.30 Music as social and psycho-cultural space - identity (Arild Bergh, Chair):

Ian Sutherland, Memorial University of Newfoundland and SocArts, Music and the reflexive self: Paul Hindemith composer and aesthetic agent

Trever Hagen, SocArts, The Prague musical underground, 1968-1989

3.30-4.00 Tea

xFi Seminar Room B Keynote Sessions (David Inglis and Gary Ansdell, Chairs):

4.00-4.45 Antoine Hennion, École des mines, Performing music/relations [title forthcoming]

4.45-5.30 Kari Batt-Rawden, Eastern Norwegian Research Institute, Music as a technology of health

5.30-6.15 Panel Discussion: The futures of arts sociology. Marta Hererro, University of Plymouth (Co-editor, Art and Aesthetics: Critical Concepts in the Social Sciences, 4 Vols), David Inglis, University of Aberdeen (and Editor, Cultural Sociology), Gary Ansdell, Director of Education, Nordoff Robbins Centre for Music Therapy, and Mercédès Pavlicevic, Director of Research, Nordoff Robbins Centre for Music Therapy