CONCEPT NOTE

The academic field designated as ‘Cultural Studies’ has evinced a keen interest in studying ‘music’ through the lens of ‘culture’ in regular intervals. In The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction (2012), Martin Clayton, Richard Middleton, & Trevor Herbert—after providing an overview of the increasing interest in studying music through Anthropology, cultural sociology, Anglophone Cultural studies, popular music studies, & critical musicology during the last few decades of twentieth century— have stressed the need to overcome the ‘parochialism’ of ‘old musicology’ and lamented the fact that the study of music initiated in the recent past has mostly been limited to the ‘Anglophone academy’ (Middleton et al. 3). Besides, Middleton et al. have polemicised: ‘any attempts to study music without situating it culturally are illegitimate’ (4). In Popular Music Scenes and Cultural Memory (2016), Ian Rogers & Andy Bennett have gone a step further by combining scene theory and cultural memory studies to project ‘textual & audio-visual representations’ like song and music as beneficiaries of ‘local’, ‘national’ and ‘global’ historical legacies (2). Taking a cue from these attempts to study music, our conference seeks to connect ‘Bengali Songs’ with ‘Cultural Studies’.

With more than 273 million users (including first & second-language speakers), Bengali consistently figures in the top 10 of the world’s major languages (https://www.icls.edu/blog/most-spoken-languages-in-the-world). A long musical tradition and a vibrant culture (assimilating both indigenous & global influences) make Bengali songs a potentially rewarding (but regrettably neglected) topic for sustained academic deliberations. Significantly, for this venture, we have consciously preferred ‘song’ to ‘music’ as a key term taking into account:

⮚          Singer’s contribution to various forms & traditions of songs.

⮚          The centrality of language in songs (Shepherd and Wicke 56-57).

⮚          Transmedial journey(Jatra, Theatre, Film, Ad-jingles, the Web etc.)  of songs (Brembilla ).

⮚          Involvement of the ‘mass audience’ with songs (Wall 229-239)

The goals of the conference are as follows:

• To bring together academics and enthusiasts to discuss the diverse aspects of Bengali songs
• To provide a platform for academically oriented interaction(s) with renowned performers and listeners of Bengali songs

• To generate a nuanced discourse about songology transcending the popular-high brow cultural binary
• To offer a publication opportunity for selected papers delivered at the conference

Particpants are invited to submit abstracts of scholarly and/or creative presentations on topics related to Bengali songs.

SUB-THEMES

Abstracts may focus on but are by no means to be constricted by the following sub- themes:

• Close-reading of songs
• Afterlives of Songs (including adaptation, parody, pastiche etc.)
•  Songs in different media
• Song Production & Consumption,disability, etc.)
• Makers & Performers
• Lost & Endangered Traditions
• Instruments & Techniques
• Technologies & Platforms
• Translation & Transcreation of Songs (to and from Bengali)
•  Libraries, Archives & Networks
• Songs and Visual Culture
• Genres & Forms (Political, Children’s, Comic, Romantic, Mystical, Patriotic, Devotional, etc.)
• Folk Traditions
• Subaltern Songs (gender, caste, class,
• Songs on Myths & Legends
• Songs on Festivals & Celebrations
• Songs on History & Memory
• Songs on Wars & Disasters
•  Song, Recitation & Dance
• Songs in the Academia

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

• We invite proposals for presentations of 10-15 minutes duration in the form of abstracts (between 100 and 300 words), accompanied by a brief CV of the presenter (max. 80 words) by 21.06.2025.
• Please mail your abstract and CV following the above instructions to:
• conferencebengalisongs@gmail.com . Selected presenters will be intimated by 23.06.2025.
• Online payment and Registration will be completed by 26.06.2025
• In case of presentation made by joint authors, each of them should get registered separately.

Registration fees to be paid is as follows (in INR):

Paper Presenters: Faculty- ₹ 800 /-

Research Scholars- ₹ 700 /- Students- ₹ 500 /-

Others- ₹ 600 /- Participants only: ₹ 500 /-

Please click the link for more details about organizers, speakers, etc.: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qgYH4RriwhKBS7xWzP_t1OFQj-bI3deE/view?u...

Details about speakers: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UqWwuAJlqtS_Yl_4J0O9AgvY3880SlY9/view?u...

Works Cited:

Brembilla, Paola. “Transmedia Music: The Values of Music as a Transmedia Asset”. The Routledge Companion to Transmedia Studies, edited by Matthew Freeman and Renira Rampazzo Gambarato, Routledge, 2019, pp.82-89.

Middleton, Richard et al. The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction. Routledge, 2012.

Rogers, Ian, and Andy Bennett. Popular Music Scenes and Cultural Memory. Palgrave, 2016.

Shepherd, John, and Peter Wicke. Music and Cultural Theory. Polity Press, 1997.

Wall, Tim. Studying Popular Music Culture. Sage, 2013.