The Wily Filipino

Call for Papers: This Magic Moment.

Too busy to write anything right now -- an entry on Friendster and Filipino class boundaries will have to be postponed -- so I thought I'd post this:

CALL FOR PAPERS: This Magic Moment: Capturing the Spirit and Impact of Music The 2004 Experience Music Project Pop Conference Seattle, Washington April 15 - 18, 2004

It might be a song, an album, or a performance, the flowering of a vision or the eruption of a scene. Music often seems to come to us in a kind of burst, leaving behind the sense of a mystery that needs deciphering. But what's the best approach? Musicians can be frustrated by attempts to categorize rather than delve into their work. Journalists often find that their deepest take on a subject comes long after their piece has been turned in. Academics grapple with how to bring issues of emotion, affect, and meaning into their analyses.

For the 2004 EMP Pop Conference, we invite papers and other kinds of presentations that closely examine specific musical moments, past and present, across any genre. The idea is to bring to the surface aspects of musical experience that often get subsumed in tidier accounts. All perspectives are welcome: political, literary, musicological, historical, sociological, aesthetic, identity-based, and beyond.

Participants are urged to treat the way they write about music as seriously as what they write about. This year's conference will serve as the basis of a future special issue of Popular Music devoted to questions of style and perspective in music writing. To that end, and beginning with the abstracts that are submitted, we'd like to see work (however scholarly, engaged, or experimental) whose sense of language rises to the challenge of the music under examination.

The Pop Conference, now entering its third year, is an annual event, hosted by Seattle's interactive music museum, Experience Music Project. This gathering connects an unusually broad range of academics, journalists, musicians, industry figures, and anyone else interested in ambitious music writing that crosses disciplinary walls. The 2002 conference inspired a book, "This is Pop," due out in 2004 on Harvard University Press. A second book, based around the 2003 and current conference, is under development. For more information, go to: http://www.emplive.com/visit/education/popConf.asp

This year's program committee includes: Gage Averill (NYU), David Brackett (McGill), Carrie Brownstein (Sleater-Kinney), Michelle Habell-Pallan (University of Washington), Margo Jefferson (New York Times), writer Greil Marcus, Ann Powers (EMP), Oliver Wang (UC Berkeley), Eric Weisbard (EMP), and writer Douglas Wolk. The conference is sponsored by the Seattle Partnership for American Popular Music: EMP, KEXP, and the University of Washington School of Music.

We welcome maverick suggestions, encourage performance ideas, and can accommodate nearly any form of technological presentation. Proposals should include a roughly 250 word abstract of the paper, a brief biography of the presenter, preferred affiliation/title, and complete contact info. Please send all proposals by December 15, 2003, to Eric Weisbard at EricW@emplive.com.