Imagining a Just and Green Future for Music Cities: The Case of Glasgow as a UNESCO City of Music

Imagining a Just and Green Future for Music Cities: The Case of Glasgow as a UNESCO City of Music
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This is a past event

Join Professor Matt Brennan in the first of our music research seminars.

A city’s music industry and culture may initially seem ephemeral and immaterial, but they rely on a significant and unglamorous infrastructure (buildings from pub to stadium, artist and audience transport, plastic and e-waste, not to mention the digital infrastructure supporting the city’s musical life online – see, for example, Pedelty 2011; Devine 2019; Brennan 2020; Brennan and Devine 2020; Brennan 2021). This paper discusses a new project which aims to (1) map and qualitatively understand the infrastructure and complex systems underpinning music industry activity at the level of a city, using Glasgow as a case study; and (2) envision what role music sectors might play in the urban challenge of accelerating a just and green transition. Ultimately this paper considers a question: what does a ‘just and green transition’ mean in the context of a city’s music industry and culture, and how can music activity be integrated into the city’s wider transition strategy?

Matt Brennan is Professor of Popular Music and Convenor of the MSc Music Industries degree at the University of Glasgow. He has served as Chair of the UK and Ireland branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM), and has authored, co-authored, and edited several books in the field of popular music studies. His latest book, Kick It: A Social History of the Drum Kit (Oxford University Press) was named one of the "best music books of 2020" by the Financial Times, and his previous monograph, When Genres Collide (Bloomsbury), was named as one of Pitchfork’s “Favourite Music Books of 2017”.

Speaker
Professor Matt Brennan
Venue
MacRobert Building, MR055
Contact

This seminar will also be available to attend via Microsoft Teams. Please contact Christina Ballico (christina.ballico@abdn.ac.uk) for the link to join via Microsoft Teams.