How Does “Your” Music Sound? Belonging, Communities, and Identities in Popular Music across Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe

International conference: How Does “Your” Music Sound? Belonging, Communities, and Identities in Popular Music across Central, Eastern and South-Eastern Europe will be held at the Faculty of Social Sciences between 9. and 10. November 2023. The conference will take place in lecture room 23. 

Over the past three decades, case studies from Central, Eastern, and South-Eastern Europe have enriched the fields of popular music studies, sonic studies, cultural studies, and ethnomusicology, offering insights into the complex entanglements between music practices, industries, and audiences on the one hand, and different aspects of belonging, identification, and community-formation on the other. Analyses of modern local and regional popular-music manifestations such as (turbofolk, Austropop, chalga, manele, tallava, Serbian trapfolk, Bulgarian trap, Slovenian folk pop etc.) provide an invaluable insight into the multitude of music- and soundscapes in the region. They also present a springboard for further inquiry into the mechanisms, impact, and architectures of belonging, identification, and communities in this diverse space, historically marked by a vibrant dynamic of glitches, ruptures, and connections.

Foregrounding Central, Eastern, and South-Eastern Europe as a loose anchoring point, the conference programme is aimed to examine how identities, communities and belongings are constituted, negotiated, maintained, and contested in the context of popular music. In this context, this conference seeks to unpack how the notion of “ours” gets entangled with music, producing various definitions of “our music” that may refer to diverse reference points, from the nation to the hood; from one genre to another; from the club to the online channels.

The conference will be held in English.

Learn more about this conference and its programme on the link.