Music Department

How can sounds be queer? What is the relationship between such sounds and the spaces in which they resound and which they represent? How are gender and sexuality related to sonic queerness and its spatial dimensions? Are media representations of queer constituencies, both sexual and gendered, clichéd, transgressive, or neither of these alternatives?

For the past 30 years the critical field of lesbian/gay/queer musicology has advanced a queer studies agenda by promoting the destabilization of heteronormativity: the taken-for-granted and dominant socio-sexual order. This critical view on audiovisual expression under examination in this symposium emphasizes the visuality, but also the audibility, of sexual and gender minorities. We further consider the term “queer” in its widest possible sense, beginning from GLBT communities and ending in queered genders and sexualities in general, including any outlook that challenges normative binarities.

Speakers include the musicology staff and queer studies scholars from Finland and abroad. A panel comprising scholars from several disciplines will discuss the issue, “interdisciplinary views on queer sounds and spaces”
The keynote speakers are:

Prof. Caryl Flinn (University of Michigan)
Prof. Stan Hawkins (University of Oslo)
Dr. Freya Jarman (University of Liverpool).

The symposium is organized jointly by the musicology department of Turku University, the International Institute for Popular Culture (IIPC), and the gender fraction of the Finnish Doctoral Programme for Music Research.

Note that I will also hold a lecture entitled “Hyperembodiment and Agency in the Pop Video” at the International Institute for Popular Culture (IIPC).

Click here for the program

One of my recent Master degree students has contributed to a very important critical study on the politics concerning Rock City in Namsos. Here is a link to an article that has come out in Adressavisen.

Kommunikasjonssvikt

This article is in Norwegian and deals with the question: ‘What is typical Norwegian music’?

I make the claim that in popular music it is only really Black Metal that is internationally associated with Norwegian music. The writer of this article, Solveig Nygaard Langvad, also gets Bjørn Hatterud to comment. He is in complete disagreement with me that Alexander Rybak’s Eurovision song, Fairytale, is more Irish sounding than Norwegian.

Morgenbladet article