2013/11/28

Call for Proposals (Surrey, U.K., July 2014)

Hollywood’s Musical Contemporaries and Competitors in the Early Sound Film Era Conference

When? Saturday 26 July 2014 to Monday 28 July 2014
Where? University of Surrey
Open to: Public, Staff, Students
Speaker: Dr Kathryn Kalinak (Rhode Island College)
Admission price: Coming soon


This conference offers a welcome opportunity to investigate scoring practices at the birth of the sound era in cinematic traditions outside Hollywood and the USA. Generously supported by The Film Music Foundation.

Music in the very first sound films from, for example, Europe, Scandinavia, Russia/The Soviet Union, South America, and Asia remains significantly under-explored in the scholarly literature. Without such wider understanding of the early musical development of the ‘talkies’ in non-North-American regions, and without awareness of the degree to which such practices were influenced by, fed into, or countered US/Hollywood models, the history of film music is far from complete.

In an attempt to fill these gaps in knowledge and understanding, the conference organizers invite proposals for papers, lecture-demonstrations and panel sessions addressing film music in the first years of the sound era, from c. 1928 to the late 1930s, in screen repertoire produced outside the United States.


Call for Proposals

Proposals for papers (20 mins, plus 10 mins discussion), lecture-demonstrations (35 mins, plus 15 mins discussion), or themed panel discussions (60-90 mins) are invited as follows:

• For individual papers and lecture-demonstrations, please submit an abstract of no more than 250 words
• For themed panel discussions, please submit an abstract of no more than 500 words, and a list of participants

Proposals should be submitted by e-mail to Jeremy Barham (j.barham@surrey.ac.uk) no later than 17 January 2014. Please use the same address for informal enquiries.

Notification of accepted proposals will be given by the end of January 2014, and details of the conference programme and the registration process will be announced shortly thereafter.

The language of the conference will be English.

Discussions with publishers are planned in order to produce an edited volume and a special journal issue of articles developed from the conference.

Conference convenor: Dr Jeremy Barham

Conference committee:
Professor Mervyn Cooke (Department of Music, University of Nottingham)
Dr Ben Winters (Department of Music, The Open University)
Dr Holly Rogers (Department of Music, University of Liverpool)
Dr Jeremy Barham (School of Arts (Music), University of Surrey)



http://www.surrey.ac.uk/schoolofarts/news/events/2014/hollywoods_musical_contemporaries_and_competitors_in_the_early_sound_film_era_conference.htm