The quaint cobbled streets of Salzburg, Austria ring with string quartets, opera, lieder, and matronly tourists singing tunes from “The Sound of Music.” Next week, Mozart meets Motörhead as 120 scholars gun their Harleys into town for an international conference on Heavy Metal Music. You may have read about in InsideHigherEd or SCREAM! Magazine.
Turn it up to eleven, PhDudes!
The conference was organized by Dr. Niall Scott of the University of Central Lancashire, who told MusicRadar it is time to “recognise heavy metal’s contribution to western society” as a “barometer of what is happening at the extreme edges of political and youth cultures. It’s a movement that maintains extremism in art and culture for its subversion, controversies and silliness.”
Scholars were asked to submit Heavy Metal papers on topics including nationalism, fascism, imagery, iconography, aesthetics, performance, misogyny, homo-sociality, gender issues, masculinities, subculture, religion, anti-religion, evil, satanism, existentialism, nihilism, hedonism, ethics, horror, and gothic fashion. Everything except audiology.
The committee selected some head-bangin’ papers for the November 3-5 conference, including:
Suicide, Booze and Loud Guitars: The Ethical Problem of Heavy Metal by Daniel Frandsen BA, MA Stud.; graduate student of philosophy at the University of Southern Denmark (SDU).
Pentagram (aka Mezarkabul): Founders of Turkish Heavy Metal by Ilgin Ayik, Istanbul Technical University MIAM (Center for Advanced Studies in Music), Istanbul
Barbarians and Literature: Viking Metal and its links to Old Norse Mythology by Imke von Helden, Department for Scandinavian Studies, Albert-Ludwigs-University, Freiburg
Distortion-drenched Utopias: Metal and Modernity in Southeast Asia by Jeremy Wallach, Assistant Professor, Department of Popular Culture, Bowling Green State University, Ohio USA
Masculinities within Black Metal: Heteronormativity, Protest Masculinity or Queer? by Mikael Sarelin, Department of Religion and Folkloristics, Åbo Akademi University, Finland
True Ayryan Black Metal: The Meaning of Leisure, Belonging and the Construction of Whiteness in Black Metal Music by Karl Spracklen
How Diverse Should Metal Be? The Case of Jewish Metal by Keith Kahn-Harris
Some papers have naughty titles. Full program here. To download abstracts, click on the name of the session.
A word to prospective attendees from our resident ethnomusicologist: HearOs. Don’t leave home without ’em.
Note to newbies: There’s a pretty good bibliography of Heavy Metal scholarship here.
Image by Mike Licht. Download a copy here. Creative Commons license; credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com.
NotionsCapital 
October 31, 2008 at 2:34 pm
Auto-generated related post, “Heavy Metals Can Taint Wine” sounds almost right. A minor adjustment in the title gives us “Wine Can’t Taint Heavy Metal”. Whines can’t either. Sorry I’m going to miss the conference; I have a brown recluse exterminator appointment.
October 31, 2008 at 2:36 pm
oops, quotes should’ve been outside the punctuation. Need to turn the amp up.
October 31, 2008 at 3:29 pm
Lynn: That Turkish scholar is really hot fiddler, in both senses of the word. She would smoke the Bluegrass world.
November 1, 2008 at 12:08 pm
I believe classical and heavy metal music are tightly linked; don’t they both play notes?
November 1, 2008 at 4:12 pm
Richard: I know Heavy Metal has volume, amplitude, and texture (mostly feedback). I’m not so sure about “notes.” Maybe one of the Salzburg HM scholars has discovered some.
HM has pyrotechnics; so does Wagner, and his operas use many of the same mythological sources as Heavy Metal. Are there tattoos under those black orchestral tailcoats?
Heavy Metal Fanzines seem to know.
November 3, 2008 at 12:26 pm
How Diverse Should Metal Be? The Case of Jewish Metal by Keith Kahn-Harris
“Heavy Shtetl,” perhaps???
– Seth
November 3, 2008 at 1:28 pm
Seth:
There’s your “concept CD” title right there.
Get bigger amps, stomp boxes, a smoke machine, shaggy beards, payess, and garbardine coats. Are leather yarmulkes allowed if you get them from a kosher butcher?
The downside: no more Friday night gigs.
Mike
January 10, 2009 at 9:07 pm
I think you are “hot” guys! 😉
January 11, 2009 at 6:57 am
Ilgin!
[Ilgin Ayik is the Turkish musicologist and heavy metal violinist cited above (Be still, my heart!) -ml]
We mentioned Bluegrass to Lynn Healey because she is a master of that musical genre here in the Washington, DC area, a virtuoso acoustic guitarist, powerful singer, and masterful arranger. If you come to North America for the SEM meetings, bring your ax!