The Performance of Music on Television, c.1955-1985

8-9 June 2018; Leeds
Conference. Call for papers
School of Music, University of Leeds, UK

Supported by the Sadler Seminar fund

Convenors: Tim Boon, Marian Jago, James Mooney, Simon Popple and Edward Venn

‘Music 625' refers to the television era ushered-in by the higher definition output of BBC2 in 1964. Tangled in this channel launch here were both aspirations to technically better television, and questions of high and low culture. This two-day conference will showcase archive music programmes as provocations to discussions about the changing culture and society of three postwar decades from the fifties to the eighties. We will include introduced screenings of archive TV programmes in whole and in part. The conference will take an interdisciplinary and comparative approach to its subject: panel discussions will include contrasting expertise: in production (including from original participants), historians of TV, musicologists and musicians, bringing together in discussion musicologists, historians, media studies researchers and television and music practitioners.

Our aim is to develop a discussion on the ways in which developing televisual form has interacted with the development of musical genres. We aim to understand better how those different genres of so-called ‘classical', jazz, pop, ‘world' music were differentially treated in the era's dominating popular medium.

We seek offers of papers and presentations of 20-30 minutes on:

Interactions between music and television
Television and the performance of music
Comparisons between differing musical genres on television
International comparisons
Live music TV versus music films for TV
Music and high and low culture in the long 1960s

The proceedings will be live-streamed and archived for future consultation.

We aim also to publish a journal special issue deriving from the proceedings.

Please send offers of 20-minute papers, or other presentations to: music625 -at- leeds.ac.uk by 28th February 2018.