Departmental seminars

Music Department seminars

The following talks, seminars, or other events are open to virtual attendees from inside or outside of the institution that is hosting them. This page provides links to further information on these events.

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Anyone who hosts such an event is welcome to edit this page. Please provide the following information:

1. Speaker. Title. Date and Time. Host institution. [Enclose this information between two equals signs, to create a heading. Ideally, you should give the time given in several time zones, e.g. CET, GMT, EST, PST. This page will automatically produce a range of times if you input the date and time at your own location.]
2. A link to further information on the event, including registration instructions.
3. An abstract or other information about the event.

Editing the list of events

Please place your advert in the right position on the list, in date order, with the most imminent event at the top. If you notice that some events at the top of the current list have now taken place, feel free to move them to the archive so that the list is kept tolerably up-to-date.

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Listings, organized by date

Anna Fiveash (Lyon Neuroscience Research Centre): Rhythm is Multidimensional: Evidence for Separable Components of Rhythmic Abilities. 11 March 2021 4:30pm GMT (5:30pm CET, 11:30am EST, 8:30am PST) University of Graz, Austria

Meeting link

I'm interested in the diverse connections between music and language, and what these connections can reveal about underlying cognitive processes in the brain. My research has focused on hierarchical structure building, rhythm, prediction, and memory in music and language, using insights and methods from experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience.

Research is revealing that rhythm is not a single entity, but rather a variety of sub-processes and competencies which can be selectively impaired or enhanced. We measured performance across a range of rhythm tasks to investigate whether different patterns of performance would emerge across tasks and individuals, potentially revealing separable rhythmic competencies that may draw on distinct neural mechanisms. Principal component analyses revealed clear separation of tasks along three main dimensions: production, beat-based rhythm perception, and memory-based rhythm perception. The results support the divergence of rhythmic skills in the general population and suggest potential differences in underlying neural mechanisms supporting these skills.

Joshua Tucker (Brown University). 'My Dear Little Beer'. Alcohol, Emotion, and the Business of Andean Popular Song. 16 March 2021 4pm GMT (5pm CET, 11am EST, 8am PST). Royal Holloway, University of London

Sign up and further information here

Joshua Tucker is Associate Professor of Music at Brown University. Beyond teaching and advising, Professor Tucker is an active researcher in the field of Ethnomusicology, specialising in “sound and society in Latin America, with a particular emphasis on popular music both in the Andean region and Brazil.” During the 2013 academic year, Professor Tucker was on sabbatical leave in southern Peru, studying the changing definition of indigenous identity and its relation to the musical culture of Peru's Quechua-speaking communities. He has authored numerous papers featured in a wide collection of scholarly journals, and his book, Gentleman Troubadours and Andean Pop Stars: Huayno Music, Media Work, and Ethnic Imaginaries in Urban Peru, was published in 2013. This is a live, interactive session which will be hosted on an online video conferencing platform. To join us, please complete this short form (link embedded). Access details for the session will be emailed to you on the day of the event.

Elisabeth Schimana. Sound as Score. 16 March 4pm GMT (5pm CET, 11am EST, 8am PST) Fragility of Sound - KUG University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, Austria

Link and further information here

As a composer and musician of electronic music since the 1980s my medium is sound. When I was asked 2009 to compose a piece for RSO (Radio-Symphonieorchester) Vienna I had to think about how to communicate with this sound body. I opted for what I do best – sound and listening. Since that year I developed two different methods of communication with musicians – the live generated audio score and the audio score based on acoustic memory. This lecture examines the method, scoring, practise and rehearsal, as well as the artistic results using examples from The Virus series and the music theater piece Pricked and Away.

Since the 1980s the musician and composer Elisabeth Schimana has been active as one of the Austrian female pioneers of electronic music with projects marked by a radical approach and equally unconventional aesthetics. After completing vocal training, she earned degrees in composition, computer music, musicology, and ethnology. She has worked intensively with the theremin in Moscow and with the Max Brand Synthesizer in Vienna. Not only has she created countless radio works in cooperation with ORF Kunstradio but numerous sound installations and interdisciplinary and performative projects as well. Her concepts for experimental set-ups fathom the social field and put to the test new ways of interacting musically on the Internet. In her artistic work, Schimana examines questions of space, communication, or the body in its presence or absence, especially the imparting of compositional concepts (scores), which gives rise to completely new approaches that experimentally explore how we hear and demand a heightened musical presence on the part of the performer. Her probing approach also led her to found the IMA Institute of Media Archeology, which has dedicated itself to acoustic media at the analogue/digital interface and to the subject of women, art, and technology since 2005. Schimana’s award-winning and internationally performed work spans the gamut of composition and free playing, is inextricably bound to her as a live performer, makes reference to historical positions, but resists all attempts at categorization, and stands out, strikingly and reduced, with tremendous intensity.

Susanne Kogler. “The fragility of sound” – On Possible Connections between Aesthetics and Politics in the 21st Century. 16 March 4pm GMT (5pm CET, 11am EST, 8am PST) Fragility of Sound - KUG University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, Austria

Link and further information here

In der Philosophie der Nachkriegszeit spielt die Frage nach einem adäquaten Verständnis des Politischen eine große Rolle. Hannah Arendt und Theodor W. Adorno stellten diese vor dem Hintergrund ihrer Erfahrungen in Deutschland nach 1945, wo sie nach wie vor Residuen einer totalitären Einstellung wahrnahmen. Für beide ist die Kunst zentral, um wichtige Aussagen über die Gesellschaft und deren Status zu treffen, und beide definieren das Politische als einen Bereich der Interaktion, in dem für die Gemeinschaft relevante Fragen zur Diskussion gestellt werden. Von diesen Überlegungen ausgehend, behandelt der Vortrag die Frage, wie Kunst heute politisch sein könnte. Dabei wird die Kategorie der Fragilität des Klanges ins Zentrum gestellt. Diese spielt eine wesentliche Rolle in der Ästhetik Jean-François Lyotards, der an Adorno und Ahrendt anknüpfend ein neues, von der Musik ausgehendes Zeitverständnis in der Kunst des 20. Jahrhunderts als wegweisend ansah: eine Wahrnehmung des Augenblicks, in dem die Fragilität des Lebens wahrnehmbar wird. Seine Überlegungen treffen sich mit Adornos Auffassung des Sublimen in der Moderne und Arendts Vorstellungen von Kreativität, die Julia Kristeva in ihrer Biografie der Philosophin mit dem Titel „Das weibliche Genie“ behandelte. Die theoretischen Überlegungen werden von Klangbeispielen begleitet, die eine besondere Qualität des Hörens zur Voraussetzung haben und diese auch von den Zuhörenden fordern. Sie sollen zugleich als exemplarisch für eine mögliche politische Dimension aktueller Kunst zur Diskussion gestellt werden.

Susanne Kogler combines music-aesthetic, analytical and historical perspectives in her research, specifically focusing on music from the 19th to the 21st centuries. Her numerous publications address language and music (song, opera, music theatre), modern and postmodern aesthetics (music and nature, temporal forms, performativity, expression, gesture, electronics, multimedia), contemporary creation and gender issues. Current interests concern the methodology and possibilities of music history and critical aesthetics in the digital age, the change in cultural topographies, music (science) after 1945 and research on the Third Reich.

Shzr Ee Tan (Royal Holloway). Wearing Ethnomusicology: cultural appropriation/ appreciation and performative representation 1:30pm - 2:30pm, Wednesday 17 March 2021. Hartley Research Seminar, University of Southampton

This is a live, interactive session which will be hosted on Microsoft Teams. For an invitation, write Matthew Shlomowitz at M.Shlomowitz@southampton.ac.uk

This paper attempts a holistic investigation of multiplicities in the visual performativity of clothing in ethnomusicological practice in the academy, the field and in everyday life. Drawing from my own experiences in research environments, the classroom and conferences, as well as candid interviews with ethnomusicologists and music researchers encountered through social and professional settings, I look at how clothes are worn and presented/ photographed/ imaged and re-mediated. The context of my investigation is set amidst evolving debates on cultural appropriation, feminist movements, notions of professionalism, ritual requirements of dress, the wider societal disciplining of the human body and, finally, ease of comfort. My case studies include how the batik print is gendered, represented and signified in different ways when worn by men versus women performers/ music scholars, and in clothing versus accessories, in the (for example) different territories of Indonesia, Hawaii and sub-Saharan Africa. I also consider how ‘traditional’ and neotraditional ‘fusion’ costumes, as well as ‘concert black’ kit vs casual jeans are worn in ritual or performance settings by insiders versus outsiders, and by cultural (non) bearers on different calibrations of ‘contextual requirement’ and ‘musical privilege’. Here I discuss different approaches to professional representation, decorum and career-branding at conferences, performance arenas, in the classroom and in the course of fieldwork. In the ensuing process, I also consider the conflicting demands of practical convenience in dressing/ travelling/ ‘fitting in’, artist’s license in choice of clothing, and fashion expectations of academic researchers and classroom facilitators in different - often intersecting - playing fields. In doing so, I come to conclusions on how the wearing of ethnomusicology in theory, practice and in constantly-remediated images continue to assemble well as disassemble identities, divides and ways of being.

Shzr Ee Tan is a Senior Lecturer and ethnomusicologist (with a specialism in Sinophone and Southeast Asian worlds) at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is interested in impact-based issues of music and decolonisation, aspirational cosmopolitanism, and race discourses in music scenes around the world (including HE), with a view towards understanding marginality through the lenses of intersectionality. In June 2020 with Kiku Day she organised the webinar Orchestrating Isolation: Musical Interventions and Inequality in the COVID-19 Fallout, calling to attention the pandemic-led devastation caused to musicians, freelancers and researchers in precarious labour, even traumatic losses of artists, investigators and teachers to the disease were mourned. In 2019 with Mai Kawabata she initiated the project 'Cultural Imperialism and the 'New Yellow Peril' in Western Art Music', which has gained considerable traction among East Asian music communities around the world and turned her towards more activist-informed scholarship and teaching. Other projects she is developing include musical theorizing on decolonization and issues of cultural appropriation, including an investigation into racist reactions to the ‘problem’ of China as a politico-cultural heavyweight/ new imperialist influence. In her broader work on decolonization she stakes a commitment to collaborative ethnography in a development/ impact-based ethnographic project with transient workers in Southeast Asia, in exploration of Islamic soundscapes in Chinese transnational contexts. She is also exploring alternative ontologies and pedagogies in the disciplining and institutionalisation of musical practices in China in transnational and international interaction with higher education institutions around the world. This research has been motivated in part by changes (and resulting conversations on flashpoint topics of race and immigration) in the global higher education sector, as a result of large-scale transnational (transient) Chinese student enrolment in music programmes around the world, as well American, European and Asian establishment of China-based campuses. Her writings have appeared/ will appear in imprints by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, Palgrave Macmillan and Routledge, among other publishers. Recent scholarly work includes Digital Inequality and Global Sounds (CUP), an article in (and co-editing of) Music, Indigeneity and Digital Media (Univerisity of Rochester Press; Hilder, Stobart and Tan), an article and co-editing of Gender in Chinese Music (University of Rochester Press; Harris, Pease & Tan), plus a monograph, “Beyond Innocence”: Amis Aboriginal Song in Taiwan as an Ecosystem (Ashgate).

Daniel Elphick (Royal Holloway). 'Music on a Leash': Socialist Realism and Twentieth-Century Music, Wednesday 17 March 2021, 5pm GMT. Colloquium Research Series, Faculty of Music, University of Cambridge, UK

Please email fom.colloquia@mus.cam.ac.uk for the link to the event.

'Awful'... 'supporting tyranny'... 'mammoths and mastodons': socialist-realist music provokes strong rejections. Original attempts to define it lurched into prescriptive platitudes, or projections of intention on the part of music critics; Levon Hakobian has recently side-stepped the term altogether and refers to the 'Big Soviet Style' instead. This paper details the afterlife of socialist realism in the latter half of the twentieth century, with globe-spanning examples. I argue that socialist realism is an aesthetic in need of reappraisal, as a trend just as important as modernism to our understanding of art music composition since 1900. Our music histories have become stuck in the narrative rut somewhere between Fukuyaman 'End of History' and Fisher's 'Capitalist Realism', and we need socialist realism to get out.

Daniel Elphick is a Teaching Fellow and musicologist at Royal Holloway, University of London. His first book, "Music Behind the Iron Curtain" is available from Cambridge University Press. He is a Fellow of the Centre for Russian Music, Goldsmiths, a member of the editorial board for DSCH (the Shostakovich Journal), and a union activist, campaigning against precarious contracts in higher education.

Michael Beckerman: The Grey Zone, Middles, and the Doctrine of One. Wednesday, 17 March 2021. 17:30-19:30 GMT (starting 18:30 CET, 13:30 EST, 10:30 PST). Research Seminar Series, Department of Music, City, University of London, UK

Link to further information and Zoom registration: https://www.city.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/2021/03/professor-michael-beckerman-the-grey-zone-middles-and-the-doctrine-of-one

Over the last decade I have tried to develop three strains of thought in relation to music. The Grey Zone, after Primo Levi, argues that we are, as never before, obligated to consider widely diverse fields of meaning as we approach musical works, including especially problematic and dismal ones.

The theory of middles advances the view that ‘middles’, construed broadly, are subject to special rules and behaviours, and often present things that are impossible to place on the ‘edges’.

The Doctrine of One argues that all reception of artworks is at the level of the individual, and that routinely, something that might be a throwaway to one person, could be the core of the experience for another.

My talk explores the process of trying to synthesize these three approaches into a single, more useful and powerful, theory of music and perception.

Michael Beckerman is Carroll and Milton Petrie Professor of Music at New York University. His diverse areas of research include Czech and Eastern European music; Musical Form and Meaning; Film Music; Music of the Roma; Music and War; Music in the Concentration Camps; Jewish Music, and Music and Disability. He is author of New Worlds of Dvořák, Janáček as Theorist and has edited books on those composers and Bohuslav Martinů. He is the recipient of numerous honours, from the Janáček Medal of the Czech Ministry of Culture in 1988 to an Honorary Doctorate from Palacký University (Czech Republic) in 2014, and most recently the Harrison Medal from the Irish Musicological Society.

Pia Palme. With. The significance of a preposition in my artistic practice. 18 March 4pm GMT (5pm CET, 11am EST, 8am PST) Fragility of Sound - KUG University of Music and Performing Arts Graz, Austria

Link and further information here

Costas Karageorghis (Brunel University, London). Music, Sound and Athletic Performance. 18 March 4:30pm GMT (5:30pm CET, 11:30am EST, 8:30am PST) Departmental Research Fora, University of Manchester, UK

Meeting link and further information here

In this session, hosted by the Sound, Space and Interactive Art research group, Professor Costas Karageorghis (Professor in Sport & Exercise Psychology at Brunel University London) will discuss his research into the psychological, psychophysiological and neurophysiological effects of music in the domain of exercise and sport. He will be joined in discussion by Professor David Berezan (Electroacoustic Composer, University of Manchester) for an update on SoundRunner, an arts-led collaborative project that explores the potential for music and sound to be dynamically created through the act of running. Questions and discussion will follow. Led by David Berezan.

This is a live, interactive session which will be hosted on an online video conferencing platform. People external to the University of Manchester are warmly welcome; please email Anne Hyland (email address in link) in advance (by 12 noon on the day in question) with the session title in the email subject and your name in the body of the email in order to be admitted onto the Zoom call. Sessions begin at 4:30pm GMT and last 90 minutes.

Professor John Michael Cooper (Southwestern University, USA). 'Black Feminism, Margaret Bonds, and the Credo of W.E.B. Du Bois'. 24 March 1pm GMT. Royal Irish Academy of Music

Registration

John Michael Cooper is Professor of Music and holder of the Margarett Root Brown Chair in Fine Arts at Southwestern University in Georgetown, Texas. He is the author of books published by Routledge, Oxford University Press, the University of Rochester Press, and Rowman and Littlefield, as well as the editor of twelve editions of music by Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy published by Bärenreiter Urtext and other editions published elsewhere. He is the editor of an ongoing series of sixty-four editions of (mostly) previously unpublished works by Florence Price with G. Schirmer, Inc., and of a series of more than thirty compositions by Margaret Bonds published by Hildegard Publishing Company in association with Theodore Presser. He is currently working on a monograph titled Margaret Bonds and the Poetics of Racial Justice: the “Montgomery Variations” and “Credo” in Context.

Raymond MacDonald (University of Edinburgh). Duet for Two People Who Have Never Met: Online Improvising as a Means of Sustaining Community and Developing New Approaches to Creativity. 25 March 4pm GMT (5pm CET, 11am EST, 8am PST). University of Aberdeen

Further information and meeting link

This presentation outlines a number of online music projects during the COVID 19 global pandemic. Particular attention is given to the experiences of The Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra’s virtual, synchronous improvisation sessions.

Sessions included an international, gender-balanced, cross-generational group of over 70 musicians all of whom were living under conditions of social distancing. All sessions were recorded using Zoom software. After 3 months of twice-weekly two hours improvisation sessions, 29 one-hour interviews with participants were undertaken, recorded, transcribed, and analysed.

Key themes include how the sessions helped participants stay connected, provided opportunities for artistic development, enhanced mood, reduced feelings of isolation and sustained and developed community. Particular attention is placed upon how improvisation as a universal, real-time, social, collaborative process facilitates interaction allowing the technological affordances of software (latencies, sound quality, gallery/speaker view) and hardware (laptop, tablet, instruments, microphones, headphones, objects in the room) to become emergent properties of artistic collaborations. The extent to which this process affects new perceptual and conceptual breakthroughs for practitioners is discussed as is the crucial and innovative relationship between audio and visual elements. Analysis of edited films of the sessions highlights artistic and theoretical and conceptual issues discussed. Emphasis is given to how the domestic environment merges with technologies to create The Theatre of Home.

Dan White (University of Huddersfield), 'One Does Not Simply Walk Into Mordor: Sound and Music as Suture in the Opening Sequences of Peter Jackson’s Middle-earth Films'; Stefan Greenfield-Casas (Northwestern University), 'Worldbuilding Through Preexisting Music and Remediation in the Kingdom Hearts Series'. 25 March 4pm GMT (5pm CET, 11am EST, 8am PST). British Audio-Visual Research Network

Email barnvirtual@gmail.com to receive the Zoom link (it is the same as previous sessions) and please do share with any colleagues/students who may be interested! Visit our website for further info.

• One Does Not Simply Walk Into Mordor: Sound and Music as Suture in the Opening Sequences of Peter Jackson’s Middle-earth Films (Dan White, University of Huddersfield)

The opening sequences of narrative films are perhaps the most important moments for establishing a coherent film-world and drawing a viewer into a space and time often quite different from their own, and yet these moments remain largely untheorised within film studies and film music theory in particular. This paper analyses the uses of music and sound in the opening sequences of one of Peter Jackson’s Middle-earth trilogies: The Lord of the Rings (2001-2003). The paratextual nature of opening sequences might lead us to understand them as theoretical gateways or airlocks, but it is the psychoanalytical concept of suture that proves most effective in theorising music’s dual roles in drawing an audience into a film-world and simultaneously building that world around them.

• Worldbuilding Through Preexisting Music and Remediation in the Kingdom Hearts Series (Stefan Greenfield-Casas, Northwestern University)

The now-classic PlayStation 2 game Kingdom Hearts (2002) was the result of a synergetic collaboration between two media powerhouses: Walt Disney Studios and SquareSoft. In the game, characters from both franchises cohabitate the many in-game “worlds” players must save from evil. These worlds are largely built upon the settings of Disney movies (e.g., the “Halloween Town” world based on Disney’s Nightmare Before Christmas (1997)), with Kingdom Hearts composer Yoko Shimomura oftentimes arranging the original music from these films to be incorporated into the game. Here, then, preexisting music literally contributes to the process of worldbuilding.

In this paper, I draw on the Kingdom Hearts series (2002 – present) to show how arrangements of preexisting music can be used as worldbuilding devices across and between franchises. Expanding upon James Buhler’s (2017; cf. Godsall 2019) notion of musically “branding” the franchise, I consider the politics of what happens when two media franchises are merged. Drawing on the writings of Robert Hatten (1994, 2014) and David Neumeyer (2015), I analyze this dialogic relationship between preexisting musics (as well as newly composed music) through the lens of musical troping. I conclude the paper by considering how “Dearly Beloved” -- Kingdom Hearts’ main theme -- has similarly been arranged for the concert hall, thus bridging our “real” world with the virtual world(s) of the game through a process of remediation.

Tom Beghin (Orpheus Institute, Ghent). Beethoven's French Piano: a Tale of Ambition and Frustration. 25 March 4:30pm GMT (5:30pm CET, 11:30am EST, 8:30am PST) Departmental Research Fora, University of Manchester, UK

Meeting link and further information here

In this session, hosted by the departent's Creative and Performing Practices core research area, we are pleased to welcome Professor Tom Beghin (Orpheus Institute, Ghent) to the department for a lecture-demonstration on Beethoven’s Erard piano and its influence on Beethoven’s technology-related exploration and experimenttation in the ‘Waldstein’ Sonata, Op. 53. Tom will open the session with a 30-minute presentation, followed by a roundtable discussion involving Dr Marten Noorduin (University of Oxford) as well as members of the department’s Historically and Culturally Informed Analysis research area. The session concludes with an open Q&A. Tom invites attendees to listen in advance to a video productions on this topic, a links to which is provided here: https://vimeo.com/showcase/tom-beghin-erard (password protected; please email the Anne Hyland for access). This session is led by Barry Cooper.

This is a live, interactive session which will be hosted on an online video conferencing platform. People external to the University of Manchester are warmly welcome; please email Anne Hyland (email address in link) in advance (by 12 noon on the day in question) with the session title in the email subject and your name in the body of the email in order to be admitted onto the Zoom call. Sessions begin at 4:30pm GMT and last 90 minutes.

Anna Bull (Univeristy of Portsmouth). 'Getting it right' Classical Music as a Middle-Class Social Practice. 1 April 4pm BST (5pm CEST, 8am PDT, 11am EDT). University of Aberdeen

Further information and meeting link

In this talk, I draw on my recently published book, ‘Class, Control, and Classical Music’ (Oxford University Press, 2019), to discuss why, in the UK, classical music remains predominantly played by white middle-class people. I draw on data from an ethnographic study with young people playing in classical music ensembles in the south of England to explain how the inclusions and exclusions that are visible today were set up historically in the establishment of music education institutions in the late Victoria period. The link between class and classical music is also apparent in the ways in which classical music indexes middle-class respectability for young women; and in the social relations of classical music pedagogy, such as what I am calling a ‘pedagogy of correction’. These social relations are not, I argue, separate from the music itself, but are in part formed by the demands of classical music’s distinctive aesthetic, repertoire, and instruments. These demands create an aesthetic ideal of ‘getting it right’. This means that in order to change the demographic patterns of who plays classical music, the aesthetic itself will need to change.

Holly Herndon and Matt Dryhurst. In conversation with Lily Markaki and Adam Ganz. 1 April 6:30pm GMT (5pm CET, 11am EST, 8am PST) Everywhere it is Machines - Royal Holloway

Email address to register and further information here

For session 03 of EVERYWHERE IT IS MACHINES, Prof Adam Ganz and series curator Lilly Markaki will be talking to world-renown artists and longtime collaborators and partners Holly Herndon and Mat Dryhurst about their solo practices and collaborative works in sound, dgital art & performance; their AI baby named Spawn; their podcast Interdependence; but also technology, politics and culture at large!

Mat Dryhurst releases music, research and artworks solo and in conjunction with creative partner Holly Herndon. He teaches at NYU’s Clive Davis Institute of Music, and hosts discussions with figures shaping 21st century culture on the Interdependence podcast.

Holly Herndon operates at the edge of electronic and avant-garde pop music and emerges with a dynamic and disruptive canon of her own. On her most recent full-length album PROTO, Herndon fronts and conducts an electronic pop choir comprised of both human and A.I. voices over a musical palette that encompasses everything from synths to Sacred Harp stylings. CNN noted that Herndon is “shaping the future of A.I.,” and she has demonstrated this nexus of technological evolution and musical catharsis with elevated performances at The Barbican (London), Volksbühne (Berlin), Sónar (Barcelona), Unsound (Krakow), and Club 2 Club (Milan). The sounds synthesized on PROTO by Herndon, her A.I. “baby” Spawn, and the vocal ensemble combine elements from Herndon’s dynamic and idiosyncratic personal journey: the timeless folk traditions of her childhood experiences in church-going East Tennessee (particularly the prismatic layered practice of Sacred Harp singing), the avant-garde music she explored while at Mills College, and the radical club culture of Berlin, all enhanced by her recent completion of a doctorate at Stanford University’s CCRMA, researching machine learning and music.

Jonathan Cannon (MIT). The shared predictive roots of motor control and beat-based timing. 13. April 4:30pm GMT (5:30pm CET, 11:30am EST, 8:30am PST)

Meeting link

fMRI results have shown that the supplementary motor area (SMA) and the basal ganglia, most often discussed in their roles in generating action, are engaged by beat-based timing even in the absence of movement. Reviewing a body of motor neurophysiology literature, I hypothesize that we can see timing functions of these brain areas as analogous to their functions in the generation of periodic movement: sub-second dynamics in SMA represent progress through an action or interval, and direct pathway activation in basal ganglia provides this representation with higher-level structure including sequence and tempo. Drawing on the "active inference" framework, I argue that we can see both rhythmic motor and rhythmic timing processes as examples of dynamic sub-second prediction of (and informed by) sensory event timing.

Intercultural Musicking: Ensemble Performance, (Inter)Cultural Encounters, and Personal/Professional Transformations. 15 April 2:00-4:00pm and 4:30-6:00pm BST, University of Manchester, UK

Meeting and further information here

This session features members of our Intercultural Musicking core research area. Professor Caroline Bithell, Dr Robert Szymanek, Dr Richard Fay and Dan Mawson will offer short, complementary research papers exploring intercultural music-making, followed by discussion and Q&A. The department’s gamelan and klezmer ensembles (led by Robert and Dan/Richard) serve as living laboratories for exploring the dynamics of encountering new cultural as well as musical worlds through learning to perform in ensembles playing in unfamiliar styles and/or on ‘new’ instruments. These have their counterpart in the transnational Georgian-singing communities that are the focus of Caroline’s research. The event is in two parts: a show-and-tell session (2:00–4:00pm) offering insights into the practices of the ensembles, with contributions from participating students, followed by a research forum (4:30-6:00pm) in which we home in on critical issues in the pedagogy, politics and aesthetics of intercultural musicking. You are welcome to attend either or both of these sessions.

These are live, interactive sessions which will be hosted on an online video conferencing platform. People external to the University of Manchester are warmly welcome; please register your intention to attend in advance by emailing Caroline.Bithell@manchester.ac.uk with ‘Intercultural Musicking’ as the subject and your name (as used on Zoom) in the body of the email. You will then be sent the links. (Please note that there is a separate link for each half of the afternoon.)

Jeanice Brooks (University of Southampton). 4pm, Wednesday 28 April 2021. First Editions Research Seminar,University of Southampton

This is a live, interactive session which will be hosted on Microsoft Teams. For an invitation, write Matthew Shlomowitz at M.Shlomowitz@southampton.ac.uk

Professor Brooks discusses two collaborative books that have been recently published. Both books are devoted to the 20th century French composer, conductor and pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. Each addresses different aspects of Boulanger’s multifaceted career, exploring her musical beliefs and interrogating the discourses of power, inclusion and exclusion that shaped her professional world. You can read more about each book here:

https://boydellandbrewer.com/nadia-boulanger.html https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/N/bo68373136.html

Jeanice Brooks is Professor of Music at the University of Southampton (UK). Her doctoral dissertation treated musical settings of poetry by the sixteenth-century writer Pierre de Ronsard. Since then she has continued to work on aspects of French music and culture in the Renaissance; her book on the strophic air de cour in the context of court culture, Courtly Song in Late Sixteenth-Century France (University of Chicago Press, 2000), received the 2001 Roland H. Bainton prize for the best book in music or art history. She also works on twentieth-century French music, especially the career of Nadia Boulanger. She is the author of The Musical Work of Nadia Boulanger: Performing Past and Future Between the Wars (Cambridge University Press, 2013); editor of Nadia Boulanger and Her World (University of Chicago Press, 2020) and co-editor of Nadia Boulanger: Thoughts on Music (University of Rochester Press, 2020). She led the Austen Family Music Books digitisation (2015) and current projects explore further topics in domestic music culture in Britain in the years around 1800.

Nathan Wolek (Stetson University). Documenting Coastal Soundscapes from Florida to Scotland. 29 April 4pm BST (5pm CEST, 8am PDT, 11am EDT). University of Aberdeen

Further information and meeting link

Richard Kearns (University of York), Anna Frances Douglas (University of Leeds), Tam Hare (University of Newcastle). Audio-visual Collaborative Practice. 29 April 4:00pm BST (5:00pm CET, 11:00am EST, 8:00am PST). Virtual Colloquium, British Audio-Visual Research Network.

Further information and Zoom meeting link

Wood, Clay, Air: A Collaboration in a COVID World (Richard Kearns, University of York)

I propose to introduce my latest research collaboration that is being undertaken with several international artists and musicians. The outcome will be an immersive installation that incorporates 3-4 multi screen video projections, musical compositions and visitor initiated sound. The installation explores states spanning pre to post-production of the musical instrument, the recorder. The project also deals with installation as a Visual Art form during a pandemic. The installation is currently under Development and due to be exhibited in February next year. My talk will present my role as a visual artist responsible for constructing the final piece and aligning the visual and audio elements.

Sacred or intimidating encounters - or why are exhibitions so damn quiet? (Anna Frances Douglas, University of Leeds)

Through the case study of a touring photographic exhibition ‘Shirley Baker: Women and Children; and Loitering Men’ that I curated for The Photographers’ Gallery, London from 2015-2017, I address the question of why sound is not a feature of both contemporary and historical art exhibition curation. Today, sound design and music feature in and contribute to the atmosphere of theatrical drama performances, occasionally contribute to ‘living’ experiences in museum displays, and in film, even those experimental in nature, would be unimaginable without the diegetic and exegetic use of sound and music. So whilst sound and/or music is a core feature of the audio visual arts, indeed many video artists’ practice fully integrates sonic elements, for the curator of exhibitions the integration of sound let alone music remains, I suggest, both unthinkable, underexplored, and almost taboo. Why is this so?

In this practice-focused presentation I will discuss my collaboration with composer Derek Nisbet to produce a 25 mins looped soundscape that was fully integrated in my touring exhibition concept. I will discuss how the idea for including sound came about, and what I hoped its effect on the exhibition and its audience behaviour could be. I summarize the vital contribution that sound made to effecting the way audiences experienced the photographs producing, I argue, a shift from an ocular driven spectatorship to a more sensory and affective experience, with unexpected consequences. Overall I argue that introducing sound brought about an unloosening of a ‘deadening’ curatorial practice that sustains the preeminence of viewing over other sensory ways of engagement. By implication, I address the exclusive notion of art as having to be viewed in silence. A practice the philosopher Walter Benjamin would describe as individualistic and bourgeois 'exhibition going'.

My hope is that my presentation will further discussion and speculation as to why the separation of art viewing from listening has come about. And might advocate for more curators to explore the use of sound.

Always Pushing Away The Abstract Child (Tam Hare, University of Newcastle)

My work focuses on the thought-processes of my continued character construction, by investigating new depictions of material reality. Fundamental to my character is, the examination of different cognitive states, structures, controls, governances, isolation and the complex relationships between these compositional forces. Through this doctoral research, I am striving to create in written form, a more truthful representation of this individual’s encounters with their ‘reality’. Allied to this approach, is the various audio-visual and performative elements, produced in the formulation of the work’s subject and its ‘appearances’.

This research constructs, examines and then speculates on my character’s socio-cognition and experiential development. Since its inception, I have been working on, the merging of various narrative flows, together with the character’s associated cognitive patterns. The basis of the project’s history is as a social study of someone increasingly estranged from their ‘society’. I am therefore, attempting to represent a number of ‘truths’, which are vital to the ‘reality’ of my subject’s psycho-social condition. The investigation and application of pre-determined, rule-governed structures, has been central to my research. I am continually evolving this process by applying these systems to the texts, their designs and the works’ performances. The works’ form and presentation contains two principle elements: the creation and examination of its theory-fiction texts and character, and, presenting the work via the staging of performative events and presentations, of which my continued collaborations with musicians and other artists, is a vital part.

Steven Vande Moortele (University of Toronto). Microtheories of Musical Form in the Nineteenth Century. 29 April ***5:30pm GMT*** THIS RESEARCH FORUM WILL BEGIN AT 5:30PM, UK time. Departmental Research Fora, University of Manchester, UK

Meeting and further information here

This session will explore the limits and possibilities of a theory of musical form in the nineteenth century that is structured as a network of geographically, chronologically and generically localised micro-theories. It will focus on an ongoing case study of sonata form in Viennese chamber music from 1815–1828 by composers including Beethoven, Call, Fesca, Halm, Hänsel, Hirsch, Jansa, Krommer, Mayseder, Onslow, Romberg, Schubert and Spohr. Professor Steven Vande Moortele (University of Toronto) opens the session with a presentation on his recent work in this area, followed by a case-study presentation from Dr Anne Hyland (University of Manchester) focusing on Joseph Mayseder’s (1789–1863) string quartets. These papers will be followed by a brief roundtable discussion involving members of the department’s Historically and Culturally Informed Analysis research group, culminating in a plenary Q&A. This session is led by Anne Hyland.

This is a live, interactive session which will be hosted on an online video conferencing platform. People external to the University of Manchester are warmly welcome; please email Anne Hyland (email address in link) in advance (by 12 noon on the day in question) with the session title in the email subject and your name in the body of the email in order to be admitted onto the Zoom call. This session begins at 5:30pm GMT and will last 90 minutes.

Samuel Mehr (Harvard). Universality and diversity in human song. 4 May 4:30pm GMT (5:30pm CET, 11:30am EST, 8:30am PST)

Meeting here

Discovering the universal features of human musicality is a prerequisite for explaining the biological and cultural evolution of music. What is universal about the psychological representation of music, and what varies? In this talk I will present analyses of the Natural History of Song Discography, which includes songs recorded in 86 mostly small-scale societies, and experiments using these songs. We find that acoustical forms of songs are predictive of their primary behavioral functions across cultures. Adult listeners worldwide are sensitive to this fact, in that they accurately infer behavioral functions even when the songs are from unfamiliar cultures and sung in unfamiliar languages. Such effects are not, however, merely a result of musical or cultural experience: both young children and infants show comparable effects, with little evidence for increases in sensitivity across ages. Moreover, high-level representations of musical behaviors are apparently enabled by lower-level processing of pitch and duration information into tonal and metrical representations. These cognitive phenomena may form a foundation for a universal psychology of music underlying culturally varying phenomena, such as musical aesthetics.

Samuel A. Mehr is Principal Investigator at The Music Lab, Department of Psychology, Harvard University. He studies how and why the design of the human mind leads us to perceive, create, and engage with music across human societies and across the lifespan. Originally a musician, Sam earned a B.M. in Music Education from the Eastman School of Music, followed by a doctorate in Human Development from Harvard. You can participate in Sam's research at https://themusiclab.org and follow him on Twitter @samuelmehr.

Nicola Dibben (University of Sheffield). ‘Analysing musical new multimedia: music in mobile apps and extended reality’. 5 May 2021, 16.30 GMT+1. Oxford Seminar in Music Theory and Analysis (University of Oxford). Via Zoom.

Further details and sign-up information can be found on the seminar webpages [1]. You can also follow OSiMTA on Twitter @OxfordAnalysis

This paper investigates an emerging new musical multimedia form—interactive musical/sonic art experiences in audio augmented reality. It is common to think of augmented reality as visual, in which imagery is overlaid onto a scene viewed through a screen. However, it can also take aural form—audio augmented reality— in which (spatialised) headphone sound is integrated with (or more commonly) overlays audio from the physical environment surrounding the listener. Previous research has focused on the technical challenges and realisation of sound spatialisation, interactivity, and storytelling in extended reality formats. It has less frequently addressed what audio augmented reality means for musicking (presentational and participatory) and musical aesthetics. In this paper I identify distinct approaches to music in audio augmented reality, and use this to contextualise analyses of specific musical examples, including Moonmoons AR app (Anna Meredith, 2019) and Bloom: Open Space Hololens installation (Brian Eno and Peter Chilvers, 2018). I use these to highlight specific material, aesthetic and phenomenological characteristics of and possibilities for audio augmented reality music, including compositional and listener agency and interactivity, visualisation of sound, the open-work and ludification. In doing so I reflect on what the important music-analytic questions might be about these media and what kinds of theory and analytical methods might be needed to better understand them.

Nicola Dibben is Professor in Music and Faculty Director of Research at the University of Sheffield, and former editor of the academic journals Empirical Musicology Review and Popular Music. Her research investigates how people engage with music (primarily through listening) and what that engagement means for how people think about and make sense of themselves and the world. She does this through case studies and methods from the science and psychology of music and popular music studies – interests she attributes to encountering empirical methods while an undergraduate, and to a childhood infatuation with British TV chart show Top of the Pops. She has published over 60 journal articles and book chapters, and is the author of Björk (2009), and co-authored Music and Mind in Everyday Life (2010) and edited Sounds Icelandic (2019). Her commercial collaborations include investigating effects of music on driving, and working with Björk on the artist’s multi-media app album, Biophilia (2011). Current projects include a monograph on how digitalisation is impacting the experience of recorded music, partly researched while Visiting Scholar at Stanford University, USA.

Seminars are open to all, including the general public. Sessions will last 90 minutes and lively discussion is encouraged. They take place on Wednesday afternoons, beginning at 16.30 UK time, via Zoom.

Matt Brennan (University of Glasgow). The cost of music. 4pm, Wednesday 5 May 2021. Hartley Research Seminar, University of Southampton

A world where music does not have an environmental impact is a world without music. I do not want a world without music, and it is not my intention to ruin one of life’s great pleasures – the enjoyment of music – by pointing out its environmental cost. However, if we are to have any hope of addressing the global challenge of climate change, we urgently need to become more mindful of the cost of the whole range of production and consumption behaviours that we usually take for granted, including our participation in music. This talk therefore considers the music industries from the perspective of environmental sustainability. It also offers a critique of the assumption that the growth of these industries is an unquestionable good.

Matt Brennan is Reader in Popular Music and Convenor of the MSc Music Industries degree at the University of Glasgow. He has served as Chair of the UK and Ireland branch of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM), and has authored, co-authored, and edited several books in the field of popular music studies. His latest book, Kick It: A Social History of the Drum Kit (Oxford University Press 2020), establishes the drum kit’s central role in shaping the history of music over the last 150 years; it was named one of the "best pop music books of 2020" by the Financial Times. His previous monograph, When Genres Collide (Bloomsbury 2017), was named as one of Pitchfork’s “Favourite Music Books of 2017” and was awarded the IASPM Canada Book Prize. He has also co-authored (with Martin Cloonan, Simon Frith, and Emma Webster) a three-volume History of Live Music in Britain (Routledge 2013; 2019; 2021).

Nicole Grimes (University of California, Irvine). Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Brahms's Gesang der Parzen. 6 May 4:30pm GMT (5:30pm CET, 11:30am EST, 8:30am PST) Departmental Research Fora, University of Manchester, UK

Meeting link and further information here

In this penultimate session of our departmental research fora, we are delighted to welcome Professor Nicole Grimes (University of California, Irvine) whose paper considers the rich cultural context for Brahms’s Gesang der Parzen, a one-movement choral work for mixed voices. In his correspondence with a select few friends, Brahms persistently associated Gesang der Parzen with a text from the Book of Job that he had earlier set in the motet Warum ist das Licht gegeben?, Op. 74 No. 1. This juxtaposition of Biblical and mythical tales of divine punishment provides a broader hermeneutic context for the Parzenlied which resonates with certain artworks of the Italian Renaissance (including Titian’s cycle The Four Great Sinners and his Flaying of Marsyas) with which Brahms was particularly preoccupied at the time he was writing Gesang der Parzen. The session begins with a presentation by Nicole considering how the analysis of the work offered in her book, Brahms’s Elegies: the Poetics of Loss in Nineteenth-Century German Culture (Cambridge, 2019) is intricately bound up with the composition’s rich historical and cultural context. This will be followed by a roundtable discussion with members of our Historically and Culturally Informed Analysis core research area, followed by questions from the (virtual) floor. This session is led by Anne Hyland.

This is a live, interactive session which will be hosted on an online video conferencing platform. People external to the University of Manchester are warmly welcome; please email Anne Hyland (email address in link) in advance (by 12 noon on the day in question) with the session title in the email subject and your name in the body of the email in order to be admitted onto the Zoom call. Sessions begin at 4:30pm GMT and last 90 minutes.

David Cotter (University of Cambridge), Marc Estibeiro (Staffordshire University), Antonio Cascelli (Maynooth University), Darrin Verhagen (RMIT University). Reviewing and Reinventing Audio-Visual Relationships. 6th May 7:30-9pm BST (20:30pm CET, 14:30am EST, 11:30am PST). Virtual Colloquium, British Audio-Visual Research Network.

Further information and Zoom meeting link

Virtual Music Performance: Latent or Live? [Lecture-recital] (David Cotter, University of Cambridge and Marc Estibeiro, Staffordshire University)

Writing in 2014, Margaret Barrett observed that ‘Collaborations may occur on a number of levels and degrees of separation, including those of place, time and expertise.’ In 2020, the global coronavirus pandemic provoked national lockdowns around the world, and this in turn motivated a proliferation of remote musical collaborations. Virtual choirs, orchestras, and ensembles of all shapes and sizes increased exponentially, using an array of digital technologies to connect performers across vast physical and temporal distances. However, despite an increasing number of products designed to address this issue, latency continues to frustrate online collaborative efforts, and prevents some altogether. Many musicians result to pre-recording individual parts, before subsequently stitching musical material together, but this is far from ‘live’ musical performance.

Marc Estibeiro’s Latent (2021) (for two guitarists and live electronics) explores the musical possibilities which arise from embracing lag, rather than embarking on another futile endeavour to eliminate it. A combination of graphic, musical, and textual notation provide pre-determined parameters for improvisation. The non-time-critical score allows, and indeed encourages, interaction between the guitarists and the electronics (a semi-autonomous SuperCollider patch) in ‘real’ time, without concern for the constraints and restrictions of latency.

This lecture-recital illuminates the approaches taken by creative partnerships operating remotely, processes of co-performer communication (especially the navigation of omnidirectional feedback loops in the virtual domain), and the nature of collaborating ‘online’ in the 21st century.

The paragone: audio-visual framework in historical perspective (Antonio Cascelli, Maynooth University)

The development of multi- and digital media over the last decades have brought into sharp focus the close relationship between the audio and visual worlds. However, this relationship constituted a core element in the formation of cultural meanings well before the twenty-first century. In this presentation I will explore the phenomenon from a historical perspective and look at the elements that form the background for our modern understanding of how music and images are connected. My hypothesis is that the paragone of the arts in renaissance culture – the idea that it is possible to illuminate one art through the other/s – constitutes the framework to comprehend the links between the senses, which are central to the way that music and images work together. From Leonardo – for whom painting is superior to its sister art, music – to Comanini’s treatise Il Figino, where ultimately the arts are placed on a more equal plane – the paragone undergoes a process of transformation which ultimately reconfigures and reshapes the relationship between the senses in a web of fully embodied affects and e/motions. In particular I will focus on few key moments that highlight the transformations: from Leonardo to Figino, through Vasari and the elements of rhetoric that compound a shared space between visual and aural imaginations in a performative space, whose traces can be tracked in the Counter-reformation milieu, contributing to the formation of a new form of, and space for spectatorship, particularly in the world of opera.

Darth, Mick and Dzhokhar: Emotional modelling and the waning hysteria of soundtrack villainy (Darrin Verhagen, RMIT University)

Historically, the “golden age of soundtrack” in cinema was informed by conventions from the Romantic classical era. In opera, leitmotifs were a 19th Century form of musical code designed to remove any moral or narrative uncertainty for the audience concerning character, intent or circumstance. In this model, different characters would have specific personal anthems with clearly signposting their roles in the story being told. Alongside this important semiotic function was the genre’s concurrent embrace of emotional intensity. This combination of clarity with bold affect made heroes all the more heroic; villains all the more villainous. These mortality tales were also often driven by myth and fantasy at an epic scale – with such conceptual weight supported and driven by equivalent levels of musical excess. With this as an audiovisual model, it is unsurprising that many of the early Hollywood film composers came from (or were heavily influenced by) a Romantic classical background or that such approaches to scoring were considered appropriate imports for cinema narrative.

In much the same way that many contemporary stories have moved on from pantomime-level morality tales, so too have the options for score broadened in the exploration of a commensurately more nuanced territory. To illustrate such a trend, this essay will examine the different audiovisual relationships used in Star Wars, Wolf Creek and Patriots' Day to illustrate not only how models for score might be changing but also how three different types of emotion – outcome, moral and aesthetic – intertwine in the form and function of the soundtrack.

Diana Omigie (Goldsmiths University of London). ‘Music listening as a window into the aesthetic pleasure of information seeking’. 12 May 2021, 16.56 GMT+1. Oxford Seminar in the Psychology of Music (University of Oxford). Via Zoom.

Further details and sign-up information can be found on our event page [2].

Abstract:

Information seeking may be defined as the motivation to seek and explore information in the environment. The availability of computational tools that allow the information theoretic properties of musical events to be objectively quantified thus makes music an optimal testbed for studying this important drive. In this talk, I will first present studies in which we have used depth-electrode intracranial recordings to examine the cortical and subcortical correlates of music-induced surprise and uncertainty. I will then present studies that, using computational modelling, provide evidence of music’s ability to induce curiosity as a function of the idiosyncrasies of its unfolding structure. Finally, I will provide evidence that individual differences in trait curiosity may account for variations in the timepoints at which listeners derive maximal enjoyment from music. Several theories suggest a role of curiosity and interest in the aesthetic response, but the potential of musical stimuli to throw light on these epistemic emotions are still under-exploited. I will close with recommendations as to how musical stimuli might be useful in addressing important open questions in the cognitive neurosciences of information seeking.

Biography:

Diana Omigie is a cognitive neuroscientist and music psychologist, whose research interests revolve around the behavioural, physiological and neural correlates of music-induced emotions and the aesthetic experience. After a BSc in Neuroscience at UCL, and MSc and PhD studies at Goldsmiths, University of London, she completed postdoctoral fellowships in the USA (New York University), France (NeuroSpin, Brain and Spine Institute, University of Lille) and Germany (Max Planck Institute of Empirical Aesthetics). Diana now holds a Lectureship in Music Psychology at Goldsmiths, where she directs the MSc programme in Music, Mind and Brain.

About the series:

The Faculty of Music at the University of Oxford is pleased to announce a new seminar series – the Oxford Seminar in the Psychology of Music (OSPoM) – convened by Eric Clarke. Enjoying a position at a neglected part of the clock, seminars will start at 4.56pm GMT, and will last for 90 minutes – 45 minutes presentation followed by 45 minutes of discussion. These seminars are open to all.

Jonathan Godsall (independent scholar), Xue Han (Bournemouth University). Embodiment and Experience Through Film and Music. 13 May 4:00pm BST (5:00pm CET, 11:00am EST, 8:00am PST). Virtual Colloquium, British Audio-Visual Research Network.

Further information and Zoom meeting link

Birdman, musical materiality, and embodied cognition (Jonathan Godsall, independent scholar)

Scholars have begun to apply theories of sonic materiality and embodied cognition to film music and its audiences. Existing research in this area has tended to approach music quite broadly as a category of sound, and to consider common effects on the bodies of human spectators (e.g. Mera 2016 on ‘haptic music’ that we ‘feel as much as we hear’). This paper shifts focus to the experience of soundtracks in which musical performance is likely to be understood primarily as such, with consequent variation in embodied response between audience members. Specifically, I examine Antonio Sánchez’s drum-kit score to Birdman (Iñárritu 2014), in which high-definition recordings of Sánchez improvising on an intentionally imperfect-sounding instrument offer a sense of materiality and ‘sonic “liveness”’ (Carlson 2019) — and more specifically ‘performedness’ — that is unusually strong for a conventionally exhibited sound film. I argue that the score thereby issues its listeners with a compelling invitation for mimetic embodied engagement — that it prompts us to ‘play along’ with Sánchez through actions both voluntary and involuntary, physical and imagined, based on our human proclivity to ask ourselves the question ‘What’s it like to do/be that?’ (Cox 2016) — and explore how film critics’ common descriptions of the music as ‘propulsive’ and ‘urgent’ may provide evidence for this general effect. But I also reflect on my own highly embodied experience of the score, in which my inclination and ability to ‘feel’ the music are strengthened by my instrumental expertise as a drummer. This suggests a need to include embodied musical knowledge more explicitly in our accounts of film-music audiences’ subjectivity, as one of the ‘ways of knowing’ music that influence our attention to and interpretation of it (Anderson 2016), and that can therefore have a significant impact on our overall experience of a film.

An exploration through animation practice into the familial bond between mothers and daughters (Xue Han, Bournemouth University)

This is a practice-based research project for my PhD study. It combines with auto-ethnography methodology and animation practice, inspired by my life experience in contemporary China as both a mother and a daughter. When I look back at my life, I realise that there are some moments of intense feeling connected to my experience of the familial relationship that I cannot see, touch or explain but which moved me, and which could be described as extreme emotional moments. How do such affective moments influence people’s relationships and in particular, how do they shape the bond between mother and daughter? I am a daughter, but I am also a mother of a daughter and the affective dynamics of these feminine generational perspectives are interesting to explore. This research takes the form of a practice-based animation project that draws on my expertise as a qualified animator, a mother, a daughter, a Chinese woman and a researcher and uses an interdisciplinary psychosocial approach to unpack the meanings of the animation work that is produced in the form of a documentary about mothers and daughters that draws on personal and familial experience under a specific and dynamic cultural context. In this sense, the project deploys an auto-ethnographic approach that draws on personal artefacts, documents and interviews within the documentary in the manner of a multi-layered archive. It is still a working in progress project, and I hope to get some feedback and thoughts from peers who are working on sound, music and moving image practice.

Human Experiences in Contemporary Music-Making: collaborative Composing and Presenting Process in 48 Hours. 13 May 4:30pm GMT (5:30pm CET, 11:30am EST, 8:30am PST) Departmental Research Fora, University of Manchester, UK

Meeting link and further information here

When a twenty-minute piece takes two weeks to rehearse, can a public presentation of that preparatory creative journey shed new light on the process of music making for audiences? This question, posed by Gemma Bass and Gary Farr (Vonnegut Collective), led commissioning composer Tullis Rennie (City, University of London) to create 48 Hours (2020), a new large-scale concert work for Piano Quintet, Trumpet and Recorded Sound. Together, they collaboratively documented the trajectory of the rehearsal process and the motivations of the performers, as the group tackled the challenges of Thomas Adès’s Piano Quintet (2000). 48 Hours continues Rennie's practice-based research in ‘socio-sonic’ composition methodologies (Rennie 2014), where collaborative and (auto)ethnographic processes are considered both as tools, and as materials, for co-composition. In this session, hosted by the department’s Creative and Performing Practices research area, we welcome Gemma Bass and Tullis Rennie in conversation. Vonnegut Collective’s recordings of Ades’s Piano Quintet and 48 Hours will be released by Moving Furniture Records in 2021. This session is led by Camden Reeves.

This is a live, interactive session which will be hosted on an online video conferencing platform. People external to the University of Manchester are warmly welcome; please email Anne Hyland (email address in link) in advance (by 12 noon on the day in question) with the session title in the email subject and your name in the body of the email in order to be admitted onto the Zoom call. Sessions begin at 4:30pm GMT and last 90 minutes.

David Bretherton (University of Southampton). ‘Queering and cripping Schubert’s Atlas’. 19 May 2021, 16.30 GMT+1. Oxford Seminar in Music Theory and Analysis (University of Oxford). Via Zoom.

Further details and sign-up information can be found on the seminar webpages [3]. You can also follow OSiMTA on Twitter @OxfordAnalysis

As a gay graduate student in the 2000s, whose thesis was on Franz Schubert’s songs, learning of the furore surrounding Maynard Solomon’s (1989) and Susan McClary’s (1992; 1994) suggestion that the composer may have been homosexual made quite an impression. Their suggestion also appeared to provide a potential interpretative explanation for some of the odd structural features I was discovering in Schubert’s ‘Der Atlas’ at the time. Such a gay reading of the song is consistent with the approach McClary took in ‘Constructions of Subjectivity in Schubert’s Music’ (1992; 1994), and also with Sara Ahmed’s notion in Queer Phenomenology (2006) that, put simply, queer people’s orientations and experiences render them sensitive to things that straight people, with their heteronormative orientation and experiences, are not. In truth, though, I was never entirely convinced by my gay reading of ‘Der Atlas’, for reasons I will set out. More recently, as someone with unseen disabilities, I also see the song’s depiction of bodily strain, constraint and despair through the lens of disability. In my OSiMTA seminar I will explore how one might interpret the song, by first offering a technical analysis and straight readings, before queering and cripping these readings, reflecting on my own positionality, and (time permitting) speculating on the relevance or otherwise of this type of work.

David Bretherton is an Associate Professor in Music at the University of Southampton. He holds an Arts and Humanities Research Council Leadership Fellowship for a project entitled ‘Queer Music, Queer Theory, Queer Music Theory’, and his other research interests include, nineteenth-century song, the music of Franz Schubert, and tonal music theory. Before joining Southampton in 2007, David earned a DPhil at the University of Oxford. He is Equality Co-Officer in his local UCU branch and is co-lead of the EDIMS Disability and Neurodivergence Working Group.

Seminars are open to all, including the general public. Sessions will last 90 minutes and lively discussion is encouraged. They take place on Wednesday afternoons, beginning at 16.30 UK time, via Zoom.

Ian Cross (University of Cambridge). ‘Affiliative Interaction in Music and Speech’. 26 May 2021, 16.56 GMT+1. Oxford Seminar in the Psychology of Music (University of Oxford). Via Zoom.

Further details and sign-up information can be found on our event page [4].

Abstract:

Most research into language-music relationships has privileged language in the comparisons that it makes between the two domains. Music has generally been explored as though it were a sonic domain made up of complex patterns that can elicit aesthetic or hedonic responses, while studies of language are founded on its capacity to express complex propositions that can reflect states of affairs in the world. While music may resemble language in its combinatorial properties, in comparison with language it lacks the all-important property of compositionality; it thus appears to be a pale analogue of language with limited utility and little relevance outside the realm of entertainment. This view is, however, completely controverted by the fact that across cultures music constitutes a participatory medium for communicative interaction with diverse and significant functions. Participatory music displays features and involves processes that equip it to manage social relations by inducing a sense of mutual affiliation between participants. At least some of those features and processes are present in other modes of human interaction, particularly those genres of speech concerned with establishing or continuing mutual affiliation or attachment, generally termed “phatic”. I suggest that music as an interactive medium intersects so significantly with speech in the phatic register as to be indistinguishable from it. I hypothesise that affiliative communicative interaction need be neither music nor speech, but that these are best construed as culturally-constituted categories of human behaviour; the superordinate and generalisable category into which both fall is that of human affiliative communicative behaviour, which can be claimed in different cultures to be music, speech, or any one of a range of other categories in other possible taxonomies of human communicative behaviour. This paper will survey evidence from ethnomusicology, linguistics and the cognitive sciences of music, and from recent research at Cambridge into spontaneous interaction in speech and music, that lends support to this hypothesis.

Biography:

Ian Cross is based in the Faculty of Music at the University of Cambridge, where he is Professor and Director of the Centre for Music and Science. His early publications helped set the agenda for the study of music cognition; he has since published widely in the field of music and science, from the psychoacoustics of violins, through the evolutionary roots of musicality, to the effects of group music-making on the development of children's empathic capacities. The two main strands of his current research involve testing ways of making musical notation easier to read, and the experimental investigation of common processes that underlie interaction in speech and in music. He is Editor-in-Chief of SAGE's new Open Access journal Music & Science, is a Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge and a classical guitarist.

About the series:

The Faculty of Music at the University of Oxford is pleased to announce a new seminar series – the Oxford Seminar in the Psychology of Music (OSPoM) – convened by Eric Clarke. Enjoying a position at a neglected part of the clock, seminars will start at 4.56pm GMT, and will last for 90 minutes – 45 minutes presentation followed by 45 minutes of discussion. These seminars are open to all.

Manuella Blackburn (Open University). Overcoming Sonic Stalemates: Representing cultural diversity in sample packs. 10 June 2021, 16.00 BST (17.00 CEST, 11.00 EDT, 8.00 PDT) Open University, UK

Sign up and further information here [5]

The first in the summer series of Open University seminars introduces an in-progress research project focused on the representation of cultural diversity both within sample pack development and upon sample pack distribution sites. This project takes forward the completed Instruments INDIA sound archive as a research outcome from 2013 (which explored the position of cultural sound materials within electronic music making) and demonstrates how this is being transformed into sample pack content as a commercialised product. Working in tandem with project partners, Milap (the UK’s leading Indian Arts Development Trust) and 28 contributing musicians, the project has begun to address key concerns over inclusivity and representing musicians’ aspirations in this growing area of the music industry. This talk introduces the concepts of one-shots, loops and virtual instruments within the context of sample pack creation and discusses how applying ED&I thinking to these areas has an impact upon global end users such as bedroom producers, sound designers and songwriters in creative communities. ‘Overcoming Sonic Stalemates’ was one of 10 AHRC-funded projects selected for their pilot ED&I Fellowships launched in 2020.

Manuella Blackburn is a composer of electroacoustic music who specialises in fixed media creation. Her work in digital media covers music for loudspeakers, instruments and electronics, audio-visual creations, and music for dance. Manuella has worked in residence in the studios of Miso Music (Lisbon, Portugal), EMS (Stockholm, Sweden), Atlantic Centre for the Arts (New Smyrna Beach, FL, USA), and Kunitachi College of Music (Tokyo, Japan) and has been awarded prizes in 13 international digital arts competitions.

Matthew Gardner (Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen). Queen Caroline, Music and Handel Revisited. 17 June 2021, 16.00 BST (17.00 CEST, 11.00 EDT, 8.00 PDT) Open University, UK.

Sign up and further information here [6]

Abstract:

Queen Caroline (1683–1737) was a long-term supporter of Handel and his music. Her connection to the composer began in 1710 when he was appointed Kapellmeister to the Hanoverian court. In London from 1714 Caroline continued to show interest in music and Handel in particular, helping him to further develop his career. She regularly attended the opera, organised private performances at court, and ensured that her children received a good musical education with Handel employed as a music master to her daughters. Although some royal support of music did continue after Caroline’s death, it is evident from a general decline that she was the driving force behind royal patronage, rather than her husband George II. Handel’s anthem for the funeral of Queen Caroline, The ways of Zion do mourn (1737), and individual aspects of her support of music and Handel, as well as her general interest in the arts have received some scholarly attention. Her broader support of music in connection with Handel’s London career has, however, not been addressed in one place. This paper therefore revisits Queen Caroline’s interests in music, providing new context surrounding her role in the Hanoverians’ patronage of Handel.

Biography:

Matthew Gardner holds a Junior Professorship in Musicology at the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen in association with the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur Mainz. He has published widely on Handel and his contemporaries, and with Alison DeSimone recently co-edited Music and the Benefit Performance in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 2020). He is a member of the editorial board of the Hallische Händel-Ausgabe, for which he has edited the Wedding Anthems and is currently preparing Deborah.

Michael Birenbaum Quintero (University of Boston, US). Music/Leisure/Labor - Racializing Musical Bodies in Colombia (1850-1950). 24 June 2021, 16.00 BST (17.00 CEST, 11.00 EDT, 8.00 PDT) Open University, UK.

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Abstract:

The opposition of music and leisure to productivity and work is a long-standing trope in Western thought. Music inherently requires time and bodily effort – the concrete ingredients of abstract labor – but without directly producing rent. Thus the embodied practice of music has constituted an important foil to productive bodily labor in the global ideological project of disciplining bodies for capitalist labor.

These bodies, of course, are also raced and gendered. Thus, much as Richard Leppert theorizes the gendered musicalization of the female body in the delineation of the domestic and workaday worlds in bourgeois Europe, this paper posits the musicalization of racialized bodies to represent and discipline indolence in the capitalist modernization of settler-colonial societies.

I examine how the proto-ethnological accounts of nation-builders in nineteenth-century Colombia describe the laboring and musicking bodies of Black people in accounts of Black unsuitability for modernity, suggesting that musicality operated as an important heuristic of what Syed Hussein Alatas has called “the myth of the lazy native.” I then discuss recurrent tropes of the unproductive black musical body in the delineation and commodification of leisure time in the twentieth century, tracing the recrudescence of images of Black musical non-productivity as a template for leisure-time consumption in the Colombian music industry as described by Peter Wade.

By cross-referencing these evocations of Blackness, musicality, labor, and leisure, this paper positions music as an important axis along which racialized divisions of labor and the commodification of leisure-as-consumption took place in Colombia.

Biography:

Michael Birenbaum Quintero is Associate Professor of Music and Chair of the Musicology & Ethnomusicology Department at Boston University. His monograph, Rites, Rights and Rhythms: A Genealogy of Musical Meaning in Colombia’s Black Pacific (Oxford UP, 2018) was awarded a 2020 Ruth Stone Prize by the Society for Ethnomusicology.

Pauline Muir (Goldsmiths, University of London). 1 July 2021, 16.00 BST (17.00 CEST, 11.00 EDT, 8.00 PDT) Open University, UK.

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Abstract

Hailed as ‘Meghan’s Choir’ and bought to international prominence at the Royal Wedding of Harry and Meghan, the Kingdom Choir from South London are a proud signifier of Black Majority Churches (BMCs) in the UK. Although these diasporic churches have been core to the Christian landscape in the UK and vibrant congregational singing are germane to their public presentation and liturgical practices, there is a lacuna regarding a systematic analysis of music in these environments.

Song repertories, musicological analysis, cultural practices and theological proclivities present a unique opportunity to circumnavigate religious, ethnic and musical identities in these settings. Following ethnographic research using the analytical framework of Nattiez’s (1990) model of musical discourse, - that is, the experience by the receivers, the music itself and the perspective of the producers, this paper will explore and deconstruct the congregational music in four London BMCs. Grappling with notions of reverse mission and prosperity gospel on the one hand, and the inherent contradictions of a commercial contemporary worship music industry, on the other, the research concluded that the global Christian music industry and its supporting systems are not reflective of UK BMC congregations although these sounds dominated both the large and small churches in the study.

These findings make problematic the understanding of the local and the global in BMC congregational music and underlines a colonial bias which privileges white music forms with its concomitant economic benefits.

Biography

Pauline Muir is a lecturer in Arts Management at Goldsmiths College, University of London. She originally trained as a classical double bass player and later went onto complete a PhD in Sociology of Religion from Birkbeck College, University of London. Her research interests focus on the politics of ‘race’, identity and congregational music in Black Majority Churches.