CALL FOR PAPERS CONFERENCE ‘MUSIC, MEDIA AND GLOBAL MESSAGES’,  YORK, 9-10 JUNE 2025  York St John University and the International Musicological Society’s study group Music and Media (MaM) present their annual conference (9-10 June 2025).  Music, Media, and Global Messages   Come to York, which is both the birthplace of the versatile composer, John Barry (1933-2011), and a UNESCO City of Media Arts, which houses many media companies, including VFX companies, film companies, art magazine and more. Take the opportunity to explore place and space within a rich historical city, hosted in person by the York St John University’s School of the Arts, that supports diverse approaches to music and media in their broadest senses.   Be inspired by Barry, who was a pluralistic composer writing for animation, TV and film, as well as collaborating with popular musicians. He wrote music for westerns, spy thrillers, romance, historical epics, sci-fi, biopics and more, presenting a wider range of cultural through music. Crossing genre borders, Barry demonstrates the reach and breadth of media and music, and the interpolation of the arts in creating stories, narratives, and transcultural engagement, emotional interaction and presentation, raising questions of place, space, cultural appropriation, access, and interpretation, and more.   Bringing together colleagues across disciplines, scholars, students, as well as practitioners, this conference aspires to share knowledge, research and practice, which shows similar versatility to that inspired by Barry. In his work, he represented a diverse range of genres, places, spaces, eras, cultures, and more. For this joint conference of York St John University and the Study Group Music and Media (MaM) under the auspices of the International Musicological Society, we particularly welcome individual papers (20 minutes; 10 minutes Q&A), themed panels (or 3 or 4 papers), and screenings, which relate to the following themes:  Themes: 

1. Translation: how are these art forms and works translated into new cultures, what is the role of subtitles or dubbing, and how can these art forms we accessible to all? Papers might problematise how a story (the target text) responds to the original narrative (the source text). How language is central to music and media communicating, how creative artists work in collaboration, and how the final work is received. 
2. Music and Affect: what is the emotional impact of combining music and media; how do these art forms manipulate the spectator; how do these art forms come together to create a particular experience? 
3. Genre: there is a wide-ranging breadth of genres within film, TV, animation and so on. Genres even merge to create new genres and approaches, not least a Western approach for a sci-fi battle. How have genres developed with new technologies and/or approaches.  
4. Global Contexts: how might we read films which appropriate other cultures, and how might we consider the representation of global themes within specific genres?  
5. John Barry: reassessing his contribution to music and media collaborations, reassessments, and critical reflections of his contribution.  

Please submit your abstract (max. 250 words) and a short biography (max. 100 words) by 1 April 2025 at https://forms.office.com/e/uQ2XcV7fa2.   The booking link, programme and details will be released after the peer review process.  As proposals will be anonymized for review by the Steering Committee, explicit self-references should be avoided in the abstract.   Steering Committee: Co-Chair, Prof. Helen Julia Minors (York St John University) Co-Chair, MaM: Prof. Emile Wennekes (Utrecht University) Prof. Steve Rawle (York St John University) Dr. Sarah-Jane Gibson (York St John University) Dr. Emilio Audissino (Linnaeus University)  Also available online here: https://studygroupmam.com/2025/01/31/call-for-papers-4/