Newsletter No. 13 from 18th June 2012

Dear colleagues and friends,


In this edition of the MCS newsletter you will find information on the next MCS Study Day as well as a brief report from our most recent Workshop.

1. MCS Study Day on Tuesday, 26 June 2012, 10 a.m.-4. p.m.

The second and final MCS Study Day in this semester will again provide an opportunity to discuss some recent and significant publications related to our work on music and conflict. The texts we have selected for this Study Day are as follows:

-- Gier, Christina, ‘Gender, Politics, and the Fighting Soldier’s Song in America during World War I’, Music and Politics 2, no. 1 (Winter 2008)

-- North, Adrian and David Hargreaves, ‘Musical subcultures’, in The Social and Applied Psychology of Music (Oxford UP, 2008), pp. 126-38.

-- Powell, Christopher, 'What Do Genocides Kill? A Relational Conception of Genocide', Journal of Genocide Research 9, no. 4 (Dec. 2007)


The texts are available in the library of the Department of Musicology.
26 June is also the International Day For Survivors Of Torture. In light of this, we will also take the opportunity to present some of our latest findings with regard to the use of music in connection with torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment.
The Study Day is open to all, for logistical reasons we do however request that you register your interest in participating by sending an e-mail to mcs-info@uni-goettingen.de by Sunday, 24 June.


2. Workshop "White Power Music: Germany in the World"

On Monday, June 4 we hosted the latest in our series of workshops, on the subject of "White Power Music: Germany in the World". Invited speakers were Martin Langebach and Jan Raabe, authors of RechtsRock. Bestandsaufnahme und Gegenstrategien, who gave a presentation entitled “‘White Power’-music in Germany: Development – Dimensions – Trends”; Joe Stroud, PhD candidate at the University of Edinburgh, whose presentation was entitled “‘And for those of you that hate metal...’: The softer side of extreme-right music”; and Jan Hemming, professor of systematic musicology at Universität Kassel, who gave the presentation “What music does and what it can't do - a perspective from music psychology.”
Topics of discussion included national variations in white-power music scenes—particularly what makes white-power music in Germany different from white-power music in other countries, such as the U.K. and the U.S.—as well as reasons why right-wing extremists use music as a propaganda vehicle, how effective music is at transmitting political ideologies, and which types of music are most effective at achieving various goals of right-wing networks.

A full report on the workshop will be published on our website in due course.

More information on the group and its work can be found on our website at Research Group "Music, Conflict and the State"


Best wishes,
The Research Group "Music, Conflict and the State".