As we know that colleagues often have to justify funding for conference attendance with a publishing output, we are integrating publishing opportunities for individual papers with Bloomsbury Academic Press into the call. You can use your presentation as part of a proposal for the Bloomsbury Academic book series on 21st Century Music Practice. The format of the Bloomsbury books in question are a multi-author format in which four contributors each write a quarter of an 80,000 word book. The specifics of the format is that each author writes an initial 5,000 word section on the topic and then they read the contributions of the three others and write another 5,000 words in response. This process continues until each contributor has written 20,000 words. There are two distinct forms that the subject matter can take which we are calling Conversations and Performances.
Conversations
These take the form of an extended conversation between the four authors about aspects of musical (or creative) practice from different angles. Each book would comprise four sections: each author starts one of the sections with a ‘position paper’ on a topic and then each takes turns to respond to everything that has been previously written on the topic by the others – building up into four complex discussions that interweave. One of the four authors would undertake to co-ordinate the process and set (and meet) the production deadlines established by Bloomsbury and the series editor. The topics have to be about music practice but the scope is very flexible and might include: performance, recording and/or song writing in a particular style, the staging of musical theatre productions, planning and running music festivals, human / machine interaction in electronic music, the use of social media in music marketing and management, performance pedagogy etc.
Performances
Using the term performance in the broadest sense, some example of 21st century music practice would be observed (i.e. through existing video documentation) documented through audio-visual recording (including any other documentation that might be relevant) and the four authors would write about the same piece(s) from different perspectives. They would ‘carve up the territory’ before they start to prevent overlap and would spend a final chapter discussing the relationship between their four perspectives. The authors might be a mix of practitioners and academics or they might be dual practitoners. The book would then be published and the recording of the performance / practice would be put on the website. Additional discussion of both the performance and the analyses would be invited through the website involving contributions from members of the research network and other performer / practitioners.
If you have any questions about a proposal and how to take it further please contact the series editor at simon.zagorski-thomas@uwl.ac.uk.