Irish World Academy Lunchtime Seminar
Monday November 1st, 1 – 2 pm
Room IW2 42
(2ND floor Seminar Room, Irish World Academy Building)
What is a Musically ‘Creative’ City?
Adam Krims, Professor of Music Analysis, University of Nottingham
"Urban geographers and urban planners have, for decades, touted music (as well as other arts) as a way to regenerate cities economically and culturally, using the notion of the ‘creative city’ to frame such notion; and yet, music scholars have not become involved in the debates surrounding such urban planning. More recently, a great deal of skepticism has arisen, especially within academic communities, concerning the notion of ‘creativity’ and to what extent it is a useful concept in studying and shaping cities (e.g., Pratt 2008, Martin and Sunley 2003). Often borrowing some of its prestige from the related but still distinct notion of a knowledge-based economy (van Heur 2010), the notion of a ‘creative city’ remains an issue of attraction and debate, even, as Pratt and others have pointed out, in the absence of any concrete notion of what ‘creativity’ even means. My paper will examine this issue and attempt to concretize the notion of ‘creativity’ with respect, specifically, to music, and to attach the notion to issues of cities and urban location. Borrowing from Storper and Veneble’s (2004) identification of the kinds of learning that depend on “F2F” contact, I argue that music learning represents a particularly salient case. While one need not be quite as skeptical as Evans (2009) about the viability of stimulating urban musical creativity, some of these particular characteristics of music learning, and the heightened dependence on locational variables, suggest that the particulars of musical creativity require attention to particular characteristics of musical learning."
Adam Krims is Professor of Music Analysis at the University of Nottingham. He specialises in urban geography and recent music history. He has also published on critical theory, cultural theory, and African-American musics, including hip-hop. He is author of Music and Urban Geography (Routledge, 2007), as well as Rap Music and the Poetics of Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2000). He has contributed to Music Analysis, Nineteenth-Century Music, and numerous other journals and essay collections, urban change, music theory, and political economy.
All welcome. Please rsvp: ellen.byrne@nullul.ie
Irish World Academy of Music and Dance
University of Limerick
Limerick
