Wel­come to the mu­sic de­part­ment!

Amid sweltering temperatures, the President of the North Rhine-Westphalia State Parliament and the ‘Popboard NRW’ network hosted a ‘Parliamentary Pop Evening’ at the State Parliament in Düsseldorf on 18 June. Numerous politicians, musicians, officials, journalists and even a group of academics attended an entertaining and highly productive event.

“Tuning the Noisegate: Politics of Filtering, Selecting and Amplifying in Popular Music” – this was the theme of the seventh biennial conference of the German-speaking branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM D-A-CH), which took place from 28 to 30 May 2026. This year’s host was the Institute of Music at Carl von Ossietzky University of Oldenburg. A small delegation from the Paderborn Pop Team, comprising…

On 2 June 2026, the Contemporary History Research Unit and the C:POP Research Centre hosted a lecture by Dr Martin Göllnitz entitled ‘(I can’t get no) securization’. Security dynamics of pop in the 1950s and 1960s. The focus was on the question of how pop music in the former Federal Republic of Germany was perceived not only as entertainment, pleasure or youth culture, but also as a potential threat to notions of social order.

First results and next steps: Last Friday, the various stakeholders in the research project "Cultural Wallet. Data ecosystems and services to strengthen loyalty and cultural participation" met for a milestone meeting at Osnabrück Theatre last Friday.