Domestic spaces are regularly overlooked in scholarly, sectoral and policy discourses, but their significance as entangled
sites of music creation and performance, and the issues raised by their visibility are striking and urgent. From basements
to bedrooms, domestic settings are key nodal points where personal lives, global digital infrastructures and creative
networks meet. Scrutiny of the lived realities of these digitally porous sites affords critical insights into technological
mediations of musicians’ creative labour in the home.  

The conference aims to illuminate practices of music production as bound to lived domestic sites against a backdrop
of wholesale changes to music associated with digitalisation, entrepreneurialism and self-marketisation. We encourage
submissions that investigate the home as the location for individual and collective music production at a moment
when the boundaries of the public and private are eroding and the pressures on musicians as creative workers are
intensifying as a result of longer-term patterns of participation, exclusion and “flexibilisation”. 

 We welcome critical explorations from various disciplines of the experiences of musicians that consider the following topics: 

- Live music performance from/in the home 
- Music and domestic material spaces: bedrooms, garages, bathrooms, sheds, basements 
- Housing provision, welfare and the creative process 
- Gendered and racialized inequalities in making time and space for music 
- New and innovative methodologies in domestic music making 
- Stylistic and genre developments, such as bedroom pop 
- The politics of music and domesticity: resistance, safety and inequalities  
- Domestic technologies, bodies and musicking 
- Digitalisation, networking and collective music making 
- Covid-19, the live sector and domestic performance 
- Neoliberal self-marketisation and the creative autonomy of musicians 

We would particularly welcome contributions that highlight power relations with respect to gender, class,
sexuality, disability and race/ethnicity.

The conference is free and while we are gently encouraging an in-person conference presenting, online is also a possibility.

Important Dates 
Publication of Conference programme: November 2023

Organising committee
The conference is organized by a group of renowned international scholars and hosted by the Department of Music Sociology at mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna: 
 
Emília Barna, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary 
Ingrid Tolstad, Oslo Metropolitan University, Norway 
Paul Harkins, Edinburgh Napier University, UK 
Rosa Reitsamer, University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna, Austria 
Nick Prior, University of Edinburgh, UK 

For any enquiries regarding the programme and submissions, please contact: muscids2024@gmail.com  

We look forward to seeing you in Vienna at Home, Work and Music: Musical Practices in Domestic Spaces