History, analysis and criticism
Exploring relationships between musical text and context in the 20th and 21st century.
20th/21st century music
Paul Archbold: Contemporary technique in British music
Contemporary technique in British music is a book edited by Professor Robert Saxton and Dr Paul Archbold to be published by Ashgate. At the turn of the 21st century, contemporary classical music in Britain is flourishing, despite the financial stringencies caused by decades of reduced funding for the arts. British composers are frequently performed throughout Europe, the Americas, Asia and are featured and commissioned by the major international music festivals. Yet, their work is much less well known at home where contemporary classical music is rarely the topic of the general intelligent cultural debate. This collection of articles and interviews present the technical preoccupations and reflections of twenty contemporary British composers born between 1930 and 1980. The book provides a unique insight into the diversity of personal voices to be heard in contemporary British music at the turn of the 21st century.
Helen Julia Minors: The Music and Criticism of Paul Dukas
French Music, c. 1890-1935, is at the centre of Helen Julia Minors' research interests and activities. Her doctoral dissertation, 'Reassessing Paul Dukas' La Péri (1911-12) in its cultural, historical and interdisciplinary contexts', reassessed the music of Dukas, specifically defining his notion of drama presented in his extensive musical criticisms. It charted his collaborative working process and the interart exchange between his music and text, with the collaborative arts of dance, design and the other elements of theatre, as well as analysing his use of orchestration and melodic themes within a narrative context.
Caroline Potter: The music of Henri Dutilleux
The author of a book on Dutilleux (Ashgate, 1997) and numerous articles and book chapters, Caroline has written on Dutilleux's early ballet music and is currently working on another Dutilleux project, based on manuscript material housed at the Paul Sacher Stiftung, Basel, Switzerland. She and Dr Caroline Rae (Cardiff University) are co-organisers of the 'Dutilleux at 95' study day (Institute of Musical Research, Senate House, University of London, 28 January 2011). She has talked about Dutilleux on the BBC and ABC Radio Australia, and at the Wigmore Hall and London Symphony Orchestra's Dutilleux day.
Caroline Potter: East-West dialogues in contemporary French music
Exploring the fascinating cross-influences of French and East Asian traditional music in the works of composers of Asian origin based in France (such as Yoshihisa Taïra and Ton-That Tiêt). She has presented papers on this topic at conferences in Hawaii (supported by the British Academy) and Keele University.
Mike Searby: Ligeti and contemporary compositional practice
Mike Searby's book Ligeti's Stylistic Crisis: Transformation in his Musical Style 1974-85 was published by Scarecrow Press in November 2009. The book focuses upon how the Hungarian composer György Ligeti's (1923-2006) compositional style completely transformed during and after the composition of his only opera Le Grand Macabre (1974-77). He rejected his earlier modernist technique of dense and dissonant polyphony (known as micropolyphony), replacing this with a more eclectic stylistic approach, one which he used for the rest of his life. The opera is examined in detail to outline the new structures that Ligeti uses, and his use of quotation, pastiche and pitch in the music. His approach in Le Grand Macabre is different because the nature of opera put several significant constraints on his technique, and this transformed his style and compositional strategy. These changes in style and technique are analysed in detail, with an explanation of possible reasons behind these changes, and an examination of the consequences for Ligeti's subsequent music.
The aesthetics of performance
Philip Chambon: Popular music performance
Research interests in the field of popular music/recording analysis and how to inform these questions through practice:
- How do recording techniques and production impact on meaning?
- Where does the song end and the production begin?
- What makes a pop song or track work - the nature of live and recorded performances, chance moments, and intuitive practices?
In the context of his band Tonight, Philip is exploring the notions of 'feel' and how a particular band sound and 'vibe' can be captured in rehearsal and performance - both live and as a recording. Following the recent release of their album Drummer Man (September 2010), the band have re-formed. Tonight had a UK Top 20 hit in 1978 with the single 'Drummer Man', and were the first UK band to be labeled Power Pop. The album Drummer Man was originally recorded in 1978 but due to record company and management politics wasn't released at the time.
John Ferguson: Resistant Materials
John is contributing to an edition of Contemporary Music Review edited by Bennett Hogg and Sally Jane Norman on the theme of 'Resistant Materials'. Premised on active perception and the interpretive relationship between a perceiver and their environment, this paper will suggest that Gadamer's 'fusion of horizons' might be considered analogous to the notion of 'performance ecology' as put forward by John Bowers. If, as Koestler suggests, the position at which perception lies between the real and the imagined is a 'matter of degree', then this can be configured as a creative threshold from which to imaginatively listen and negotiate. Performance ecology can therefore neither be exclusively determined by physical artefacts (instruments, for example) or timbral entities (sounds), but as a cultural field, soliciting a perceiver's own memories and associations. The means by which this 'imagined agency' communicates itself is in the auditory, haptic and kinaesthetic dimensions; phenomena which are also in a sense the means by which environments and cultures are experienced and sustained, shot through with agencies as well as ambiguities to be negotiated.
Meredith White: Improvisation performance practice
Having crossed over into jazz following a conventional musical background as a pianist, Meredith's particular interest lies in the process of learning and assimilating jazz and its relation to creativity and performance. Challenges facing teachers and students of jazz improvisation include such issues as internalising the vernacular and expressing individuality while honouring notions of the 'tradition'. Jazz, described by Ted Gioia as 'that most glorious of mongrels', opens its arms to diverse musical influences and in her own music Meredith aims to explore opportunities for musical fusion. Performance opportunities are varied, centring on her jazz trio whose repertoire includes original compositions and jazz arrangements of material from outside the jazz canon, as well as bringing a fresh approach to jazz standards.
Exploring instruments
Paul Archbold: Multiphonics and the oboe
This research project, in collaboration with the oboist Christopher Redgate, sets out to investigate, analyse and document multiphonic sonorities on the oboe. The video documentary Multiphonics and the Oboe was created by Optic Nerve in 2009, with support from Kingston University's RiT initiative, and is hosted on PRIMO (Practice as Research in Music Online, the online repository of the Institute of Musical Research).
