POP Montréal's SYMPOSIUM

Aims to empower, educate, and inspire by offering intimate access to the ideas and forces at the heart of today's music world. The Symposium brings together a diverse range of presenters under the banner of music, in the broadest sense. All sessions focus on the relationship between art, culture, and creativity, with the aim of encouraging our community to build movements, strategise, and create.

VISION

Charging into our seventh year, The Symposium aims to reflect our city's diverse and artistically charged culture. Programming draws from topics spanning all segments of our festival (Film POP, Puces POP, Art POP, and Kids POP), including a special all-ages series. This year we will highlight skills-building, audience participation, and multiple perspectives through panels, round table discussions, and hands-on workshops.

HISTORY

This is our first year united under the banner The Symposium, though POP Montréal has always included a segment dedicated to bringing artists together with fans to cover topics at the heart of music. Such esteemed guests as Patti Smith, David Byrne, Ian MacKaye, Clash producer Sandy Pearlman, neuro-scientist Dan Levitan, and Saul Williams have come to share their experiences and expertise on everything from the DIY ethic and social responsibility, to publishing music in the digital era and music cognition.

Patti Smith. Photo par David F. Miller.

Steve Albini et Sandy Pearlman, "The Future of Analogue". Photo par David F. Miller.

PARTNER PROFILES

Pop Montreal International Music Festival
Launched by friends and colleagues in 2002, Pop Montreal is an annual not-for-profit curated cultural event that champions independence in the arts by presenting emerging and celebrated artistic talents from around the world. Delivering a broad cross-section of art forms and events, Pop Montreal is the North American festival providing a dynamic introduction to the next generation of musical talent and independent art forms.

Centre for Intellectual Property Policy (CIPP)
The CIPP is a unique international, inter-disciplinary intellectual property centre based at McGill University. Its international community of researchers integrates insights from fields like law, management, philosophy, ethics, science, and economics to offer useful policy options to governments, the business community, researchers and developing economies. Its cutting edge research and proposals explore how states, businesses and civil society manage new and old technologies while balancing the concerns of technology users, technology creators and citizens. www.cipp.mcgill.ca

Future of Music Coalition (FMC) - Conference Affiliate
Future of Music Coalition is a Washington D.C. based nonprofit education, research and advocacy organization that identifies, examines, interprets and translates the challenging issues at the intersection of music, law, technology and policy. By engaging these communities simultaneously, FMC has consistently identified legitimate middle ground positions that have inspired unprecedented collaboration and forward motion in a terminally entrenched environment of litigation and incumbent control. FMC has convened and hosted Policy Summits since 2000 (including last year's Future of Music Policy Summit with Pop Montreal) each bringing hundreds of musicians, policymakers, advocates, attorneys, and technologists together for engaging discussions about emerging music/technology issues. www.futureofmusic.org