Electronic music in East Asia

Welcome to Number 2 of AEMR-EJ! This volume is as diverse as the people who contribute to it. It has 11 items, 7 are topical articles & essays, 4 are reviews. They cover a wide range of issues from dealing with historical sources to globalization, from sound ecology to oral notation and collaboration with communities. These 11 parts of the second volume make up a recommendable point of departure in discussing music, its practice and theory, its role in societies and its existence as meaningful sound. May the audience and the readers enjoy and connect with the ideas presented here.

2019

2019

Announcing the Call for Proposals for the 12th UPM International Colloquium for Music Research (ICMus19) to be held at Universiti Putra Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur – Serdang, Malaysia on 31 October - 2 November 2019. This year, we warmly invite local and international academicians to gather in Kuala Lumpur and dedicate their papers and audiovisual works which will be presented and discussed as research outcomes of broad topics in music and also music-related fields. Keynote Speakers: Yu Hui Professor, Yunnan University, China Eddin KHOO Director-Founder, PUSAKA, Malaysia We welcome panel and individual paper proposals, as well as proposals of acoustic/ electroacoustic/ audiovisual work, that allows discussions and presentations revolving the main theme of "Music and the Cosmos". Exploration into the designated sub-themes below is highly encouraged: 1. Interpreting an organised sound in a world-system: A world-system, in the general sense, has established or been establishing cultural, social, economic, political and techno spheres. The expression from music practices in the system delivers to the spheres a defining landscape illustrated with senses, order, reasoning and ideas that reflect the kind of the world the music exists. In this context, we question how an organised sound can be linked to the world it is meant to belong to, and how the carriers of the music practice connect themselves to the world, the universe, or the cosmos. Within this universal view, we encourage discussions on the scientific, cultural, or philosophical observation on the music in macrocosmos or microcosmos and its nature or reasons in existence, or on an intellectual discourse of a typical system as observed in such an organised sound. The discussion can also stretch into connecting ideas in organised sounds, as well as interpretations of interconnectivity of things with music or sound in a world-system. 2. Cosmopolitanism as a way of knowing about music: In the narratives of musicological scholarship, frameworks based of facts on obligatory affiliations, such as culture and nation in particular, are difficult to avoid or refrain from. However, from cosmos to cosmopolitanism with ‘localisation’, ‘globalisation’ and ‘glocalisation’ of music practices in mind, we look into the alternatives in the narratives of music across the dimension of space or time that embrace views of cosmopolitanism as a way of knowing about music. How is the knowledge on certain music practices constructed through the world view of carriers and practitioners with the status of ‘world citizen’? How does the approach of decolonisation influence ways of knowing music scientifically and artistically? And how difficult is it to achieve this notion? We welcome discussions on methodological strategies or a reconstruction of scholarship frameworks in light of the idea of cosmopolitanism. 3. Musicking in the digital age: Humans claim to have been advancing into a ‘new’, digital age when almost every single act in life involves a digital element. Living in a digital world and time, modern people seem to be universally driven with the phenomenal idea of ‘digitalisation’, and musicking in this age and time seems no different. When almost everything about music is digitalised, how obscure have all geographical boundaries in the world become? And what impact does time still have on music and the act of musicking? From electronica, electrophones, electroacoustic enhancements, digital workstations to the act of digital documentation of the musicking process including the application of computer-mediated communication and ‘cloud’ computing tools, we would like to hear about the research findings in light of a seemingly new and unchartered puzzle on the problematisation of the subject matter. 4. New Research: Any music- or sound-related investigations, projects, new findings of individual research or interdisciplinary fields within the broad area of ‘new research’ are welcomed. We encourage scholarship of novel research frameworks, methodologies, analysis and interpretation of the topic on music studies in line with the wide coverage of the theme of this colloquium. Limit of abstract length: max. 250 words (individual paper or compositional work)/ max. 300 words (panel proposal) The DEADLINE of proposal submission has been extended to July 15, 2019, 23:59 (UTC+8), and the notification of proposal acceptance will be announced via email by August 15, 2019. All proposals should be submitted via email in a word document attachment to icmus.upm@gmail.com. Please find in the attachment for submission criteria, instructions of submission, fees details and other related information.

2013

In this essay I discuss Hugh Davies’s Répertoire International des Musiques Electroacoustiques / International Electronic Music Catalog. It is a book of 330 pages that lists, ostensibly, every piece of electroacoustic music ever composed up to the time of its compilation. I begin by describing the Catalog itself, and the process of compiling it. I then discuss Hugh Davies—aspects of his character, and interests—and suggest how these might contribute toward an interpretation and contextualisation of the Catalog. I refer to a sample of publications that reference the Catalog, highlighting some of the broader issues that the Catalog raises in relation to the musicology of electroacoustic music, including some specifically international issues.

Modernism is a Western philosophical movement informed by a Western pedagogical and historical perspective. It excludes most of the world’s music; modernism is followed by more modernism, not by postmodernism. Musical Post Modernism is the armlock that the creative world as a whole has used to subdue positivist and modernist alike, so that it might politely remind the western conservatory that the rest of the world makes valuable and intertextual music too, and always has.