Department of Music

Friday September 28 =
3:30pm: Check-In, Old Cabell Hall Lobby
4:00-6:00pm: Paper Session One, 107 Old Cabell Hall
7:00pm: Dinner, The Bridge PAI
8:00pm: Composer Salon, The Bridge PAI (free)

Saturday September 29 =
8:15-8:45am: Breakfast, 107 Old Cabell Hall
8:45-10:15am: Paper Session Two, 107 Old Cabell Hall
10:15-10:30am: Break
10:30am-12:00pm: Keynote Address by Karl Hagstrom Miller, 107 Old Cabell Hall (see below)
12:00-1:45pm: Lunch
1:45-2:45pm: Paper Session Three, 107 Old Cabell Hall
2:45-3:00pm: Break
3:00-4:00pm: Paper Session Four, 107 Old Cabell Hall

$10 for full conference registration
For more information, visit the full schedule at http://scgmc2012.blogspot.com/

Keynote Address:
Karl Hagstrom Miller “Amateurs Make American Pop: Toward a History of Commercial Pop Music as a Participatory Culture”
Saturday September 29, 10:45 am
107 Old Cabell Hall

Forget the record charts.  Unknown amateurs have always made the vast majority of music in the United States.  Scholarship about popular music, however, has focused overwhelmingly on the tiny percentage of musicians promoted by commercial record labels.  In this workshop, Karl Hagstrom Miller shares some of his current research and findings on the history of US amateur musicians and their ongoing influence on commercial popular music.  Far from a story of professional celebrities and passive listeners or fans, he contends, the history and business of commercial popular music is best understood as one of broad participation and active musical engagement in both public and private settings.  With amateurs at the center of the story, the history of popular music looks quite different.

Karl Hagstrom Miller, author of Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow (Duke, 2010), is an Associate Professor of History at the University of Texas, Austin. He studies the intersection between popular music and the cultural, economic, legal, and intellectual history of the United States. He has published on a wide variety of topics, including Tejano street singers in San Antonio in the 1930s, postwar independent jazz record labels and the 1960s and ‘70s New York Latin music scene. He is currently working on a book titled Sound Investments: A History of Music Ownership and Theft, which examines illegal musical filesharing and historical conceptions of music as property.