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IMR Newsletter No. 7 - December 2010

Institute of MusicalResearch

As a constituent institute within London University’s School of Advanced Study, the IMR is involved at present in detailed mapping of its profile ahead of a resubmission to HEFCE (in whatever form that body might continue in the wake of the Comprehensive Spending Review) for continuation of the Special Funding that supports the School’s activities in Research Promotion and Facilitation to the Humanities and Social Sciences beyond 2012. Over the course of the next few paragraphs, I thought I should share with you my reflections on the IMR’s contribution to that enterprise.One thing we manifestly do is lead and shape research agendas, promoting debate across the ever-widening range of activities encompassed by musicology. Among the evidence for this I might cite the newly-inaugurated research centre for eighteenth-century performance practice, DeNOTE, about which you can read more elsewhere in this issue. DeNOTE will evolve over the next 18 months into a broader series of seminars, lecture-recitals, recitals and a developing web-resource hosted at the IMR that will attempt to capture work going on across the divide that sometimes unhelpfully separates academics from performers. It is hoped that a fledgling programme of lecture-recitals, featuring performance-as-research projects within the field of eighteenth-century studies will provide excellent opportunities for Knowledge Transfer of IMR/SAS research to HEIs and other constituencies not just in and around London, but also in the regions (at the time of writing, springtime events are planned for Bristol, Cardiff, Cambridge and Hull). Still running, of course, is PRIMO, the IMR’s repository for practice-as-research outputs of all kinds, which continues to attract fresh submissions in performance studies and goes beyond what you may wish to upload to YouTube in that it offers a repository for supporting documentary trails leading up to and postdating the event itself – all in one place and interlinked.

Collaborations are vital to giving the IMR a degree of integration with the wider world of music research and to reflect our regional remit. Partnerships between IMR and, for example, the Royal Musical Association, the British Forum for Ethnomusicology, the Society for Music Analysis and several individual university music departments have enabled and sustained specific events and ongoing research themes that would not otherwise have been practical or affordable. Reviews of our collaborative events with some of these partners appear elsewhere in this issue of the Newsletter. Our Research Training in Music programme is also offered collaboratively and regionally (eg Durham, Liverpool, Newcastle, Huddersfield) and extends to subdisciplines such as Analysis (summer schools held in collaboration with the University of Durham and the Society for Music Analysis) and also composition: projects in 2010 in collaboration with the University of Birmingham and the University of Huddersfield and Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival.

Perhaps the most obvious ways in which we influence the scene are through our Directions in Musical Research seminars, providing a platform for as diverse and broad a spread of musicology available anywhere in the UK. Described by one Fellow of the British Academy as ‘probably the most comprehensive and concentrated series of seminars in musicology in the world today… the hub of London’s musicological research’, ‘Directions’ aims to give a steer to current and emerging research agendas and to provide access to a London audience for invited speakers, offering significant opportunities for networking. I am particularly keen to involve younger scholars in these events which maintain a reputation as a forum for lively debate and high-quality discussion, typically involving an interdisciplinary audience.

www.music.sas.ac.uk

John Irving and Tom Beghin in discussion

RMA Dent Medal Study Dayin honour of Dean Sutcliffeheld at the IMR on 27 November


You will doubtless have learned that we were recently forced to begin a scheme of charging for the IMR’s RESEARCH TRAINING IN MUSIC, a unique national-level resource offering all UK-registered PhD students a programme of top-level training in research methods provided by leading researchers drawn from across the UK and reflecting a wide spread of disciplinary agendas. I much regret this policy change and wish that the pressure to institute it had not been so great (it had, in fact, predated my arrival at the IMR, and so at least I was able to resist it for a little while). I hope that the new regime (in which students registering for the IMR Student Associate Member category are charged half price for RTM) will be considered good value for money. Our continuing feedback suggests that these RTM sessions are highly valued. By bringing together a national-level team of tutors for each event, we certainly go beyond what individual departments could hope to achieve on their own, and hopefully add value to the student experience as a result.We hope that at the IMR, we facilitate debate by providing opportunities and resources. Those of you who have held conferences and study days here will, I hope, have found these to be rewarding experiences. The feedback I have received personally suggests that this is so. In common with many of you, I’m immensely grateful to Valerie James whose experience and guidance at all stages of the process (from initial concept, through programme planning, budgeting, issuing calls for papers, receiving and collating abstracts and hands-on management during the event) is absolutely first-rate. As of October 2010 the internal administration within the School of Advanced Study has undergone a radical reshaping, reflecting new priorities and as a result, although Valerie will still be the lead contact for the IMR, she will henceforth be responsible for managing the administrative team for the IMR, Institute of Philosophy and Institute of Germanic and Romance Studies combined, leading on finance, development and policy aspects for all three institutes. Her colleagues Shahrar Ali, Jane Lewin and Christopher Barenberg will work with Valerie, providing events, fellowships, publications, web and marketing support to IMR, IP and IGRS. At the moment, we are therefore going through a period of change which we hope to manage effectively and in a way that will not confuse or diminish the relationship you have had with the IMR since its inception. Certainly, the aspiration is that from the point of view of ‘user groups’ (to borrow from developing REF terminology), the experience will be indistinguishable from previously, the revised portfolios working in the main on a purely internal level. But this change does mean that Valerie will not be as visible within our events programme as previously, although she will still be the first contact point for discussing new events. I’m sure you would like

to join me in thanking her for the tremendous support she has provided on email, on the telephone and as a welcoming face at the IMR’s events, and wishing her well in her new role.

John IrvingDirector of the IMR

DeNOTE: Inaugural Event for the IMR’s Research Centre in 18th-century Performance Practice at the Guildhall School of Music & DramaThe IMR’s new research centre for 18th-century performance practice launched in fine style in a collaborative event at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama over two days, 28-29 September 2010. ‘The Intimate Mozart and the Performer as Creator’ explored performance practice in Mozart’s three piano concertos of 1783, K.413, 414 and 415, written in dual format, for either piano and orchestra or piano and string quartet.This event, which consisted of an open rehearsal workshop and a public concert introduced by IMR Director, John Irving, featured these works in the quartet format played by John Irving, Dr David Dolan (Director of the GSMD’s Centre for Creative Performance and Classical Improvisation) and Janneke Brits, a Postgraduate Fellow at GSMD. Both ‘period performance’ (on copies of instruments from Mozart’s time) and modern performance practices were considered, and in particular, the role of improvisation by the pianist (thus going beyond Mozart’s notated texts) was a key issuefor discussion and experimentation in performance.A crowded and appreciative Music Hall at the GSMD were introduced to the project by the performers and afterwards in an open discussion chaired by Prof John Sloboda who is leading a project investigating audienceperceptions of musical performance.DeNOTE’s next events were aimed at Knowledge Transfer in the field of 18th-century performance practice, and comprised a succession of three recitals of

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music by Mozart, Beethoven and Vanhal for clarinet andfortepiano given by Jane Booth and John Irving for the Kingston Chamber Concerts Society at Kingston on Thames Parish Church (4 October), Morden College, Blackheath (14 October), and UCL Chamber Music Society (19 October). These recitals were specifically designed to engage a wide variety of audiencesin order to further the accessibility of the IMR’s research remit, building on initiatives in Knowledge Transfer previously funded by the School of Advanced Study, University of London.

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On 26 October in Senate House at 2pm DeNOTE held its first Seminar, led by Prof Colin Lawson, Director of the Royal College of Music: ‘Legacy and Legend - Historic(al) Performance in the 1980s’. Along with Prof Trevor Herbert (Open University), Colin Lawson reviewed the artistic and cultural aspirations, meanings and messages of the burgeoning of period-instrument performance and recordings during the 1980s and looked at lessons to be learnt. Reviews by Peter Collyer and Reuben Phillips can be read on our website.In DeNOTE’s second seminar on 29 November, Prof Barry Cooper (University of Manchester), Roy Mowatt (Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment; Founteyne Editions) and Dr Rupert Ridgewell (British Library) revisited the thorny question of Urtext editions from a variety of perspectives. The session was well attended despite the unusual cold snap that blanketed much of the UK in snow at the end of November causing travel chaos further augmented by a tube strike.In the spring term and beyond regional DeNOTE events will begin. A workshop on performance practice in Mozart’s Piano Concertos is already planned atCardiff University Music Department for 3 March 2011, along with a workshop on early 19th-century string playing in collaboration with the GSMD on 25 March and lecture-recitals and workshops featuring chamber music by Beethoven and Mozart at the University of Bristol (March), University of Cambridge (April) and the University of Hull (May). Further details in the IMR spring term programme.For further information on DeNOTE please contact the IMR Director, John Irving([email protected])

Old Hispanic Chant – Lecture-Recital at Goodenough College This well-attended event at Goodenough College, one of the IMR’s key partners, was masterminded by Dr Emma Hornby, Lecturer in Music at Bristol University who is working on an AHRC-funded project on Old Hispanic Chant in collaboration with Prof Rebecca Maloy (University of Colorado, Boulder). Emma writes:

The lecture-recital on Old Hispanic chant at Goodenough College was the first ‘mini-tour’ of the Bristol University Music Department all-female schola cantorum. There was a good sized audience of 30-40 people, comprising a real mixture of academics from London University and beyond (at least one visitor from Cambridge) as well as members of the public. It proved to be a very useful experience for Rebecca and myself, helping us to find ways of communicating about very densely technical theological and musicological material to a non-specialist audience. We introduced the audience to the melodic grammar of the threni, and to the theological nuances of the genre, as well as to the potential of the Easter Vigil canticles for illuminating the relationship between Old Hispanic and other liturgical traditions.

The event closed with a half-hour performance of some of the transcribable Old Hispanic chants by the schola, which gave the audience an opportunity to dive into the very alien soundworld they had been hearing about in the formal lecture. The schola were entirely bowled over by the whole experience - being part of the lecture-recital, combined with a night in a hotel and a hands-on tour of some medieval manuscripts in the British Library the following morning. We were tremendously grateful to the IMR and to the John Coffin Trust for hosting and supporting the event.


Performing Haydn’s Piano Music – a John Coffin Trust Lecture-RecitalHeld at Goodenough College in blistering heat just as Wimbledon was getting underway, this lecture-recital by the internationally eminent fortepianist, Tom Beghin (McGill University) attracted a significant turnout of scholars, performers, students, conservatoire professors, and the general public to hear an account of a recent groundbreaking project to record Haydn’s Piano sonatas in virtually reconstructed acoustics of a number of 18th-century buildings. Excerpts from Prof Beghin’s recent audio CD recording as well as an accomanying DVD film were shown, and the topic explored in detail in interview with the Director of the IMR. Following this presentation, Prof Beghin performed a 1-hour recital of Haydn’s music on the fortepiano to great acclaim. Feedback afterwards was very clear: this is exactly the kind of event that our diverse audiences appreciate, and counts as a significant knowledge transfer opportunity for the IMR and by extension the SAS and its work in engaging a variety of audiences in the local community and beyond.

By happy coincidence, a couple of similar Knowledge Transfer events (one at Goodenough College, the other at Morden College, Blackheath) were held in the two weeks immediately afterwards, thus establishing some momentum for this kind of activity. Funded by the School of Advanced Study, these events focused on historically-informed performance of Beethoven’s chamber music and were given by IMR Director, John Irving (fortepiano) and two performers from The Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment, Jane Booth (clarinet) and Jennifer Morsches (cello). The repertoire was Beethoven’s own arrangement of his popular Septet, for a combination of fortepiano, clarinet and cello. The three players combined an introduction to their period instruments with open rehearsal of a selection of passages (explaining performance techniques) and finally a performance of the entire work. The audiences were diverse, and brought together those from inside and outside higher education. Such Knowledge Transfer recitals are fundamental to the IMR’s mission ‘to build links with the music industry and professions and the wider public’, of course, but also chime with the aspiration of the School of Advanced Study to explain its research activities beyond its immediate Bloomsbury base to the wider communities it serves. It is clear that this is a valuable niche activity to be exploited by the IMR in future both in London and regionally, and to that end three DENOTE lecture-recitals and workshops are planned for spring 2011 in Bristol, Cardiff and Hull, as well as at Kings Place.

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Royal Musical Association Annual Conference, ‘Boundaries’

The IMR is grateful to Prof Philip Olleson, President of the RMA, for permission to reproduce his review of this event which first appeared in the RMA Newsletter.

This year’s Annual Conference, held at the Institute of Musical Research in London from 15 to 17 July, attractednearly 90 delegates, with particularly strong representation from overseas, including Germany, Spain, the USA, Japan, Hong Kong, Malaysia and New Zealand. It was evident from conversations during the course of the conference that the imaginative theme, and the resulting quality and wide range of the papers it attracted, were largely responsible for this high level of interest.‘As well as 40 paper sessions, held in parallel sessions, and a round table on ‘Literature at the Boundary of Music Research’, there were two outstanding keynote addresses. One, by Sara Cohen, Director of the Institute for Popular Music at the University of Liverpool, on ‘Bubbles, Tracks, Borders and Lines: Mapping Popular Music in Liverpool’, explored boundaries created through and imposed on musical creativity by drawing on ethnographic research with rock and hip hop musicians in Liverpool. The other, by Martin Clayton of the Open University, on ‘Musical Boundaries: A View from Ethnomusicology’, explored the question of boundaries in musicology, with examples drawn from his work in India and Brazil.

RMA Annual Conference 2010Boundaries

Thursday 15 - Saturday 17 July 2010Hosted by the IMR

Senate House, University of London

Keynote speakers: Sara Cohen (Liverpool)Jim Samson (RHUL) - Peter Le Huray lecture

Martin Clayton (Open University)

Programme and booking form at www.music.sas.ac.uk


This British Academy-funded international conference drew speakers from the UK, US, Australasia and Europe and covered themes as diverse as State subsidy and new music; elitism and popularity; historical studies of conductors and conducting; studies of particular orchestras, including their civic settings; orchestras and film music; politics and cultural policy; the role of orchestras in music reception and audience creation (principally in the US); and recording practice. In the call for papers, the organisers, Roddy Hawkins and Duncan Boutwood, had emphasised an interest in a comparative approach to the cultural study of the symphony orchestra, in the belief that this would better illuminate local and national idiosyncrasies. In this respect especially, the conference exceeded all expectations. Overall, there was a combination of positive energy and community, intellectual generosity and, above all, consistent critical insight. The conference focused on work-in-progress papers for the most part, and allowing plenty ofdiscussion time after each presentation, especially useful for research students in refining methodologies. Themes that received particular attention included gender studies (a study of a womens’ orchestra in inter-war France); the cultural situation of orchestras in an age of public subsidy for the arts (including public Broadcasting bodies), and their role in public policy formation (cultural settings for musical study are increasingly in the ascendent in present-day musicology, and this aspect was well-reflected in our conference); historical studies of the orchestra and its changing repertoire (principally in major European musical centres such as Vienna, London and Paris, but also in emergent US cities in the nineteenth century and in the Far East in the twentieth); and studies of performance and audience behaviours, reflecting a recent emergent trend in musicology to regard musical performance as being an ‘embodied’ culture within which music transcends a textual representation and becomes behaviour. Other key themes included the role played by orchestras in mapping colonial cultures (and counter-cultures); the relationship between the development and popularity of symphony orchestras and colonial/imperial contexts; the relation of sources offunding to choices of repertoire; or of neoliberal cultural policy to education outreach programmes. Discussions on finer points of methodology were especially instructive and useful, and some recurrent threads were taken up in theRound Table panel discussion at the close of the conference. A notable feature was the bringing together of scholars (musicologists and cultural historians of music), composers, performers, orchestral managers and the Music Director of the SouthBank Centre and the Barbican Centre, enabling these contrasting perspectives to interrogate each other. Some of the original research presented at this conference is of crucial importance to the decision-making of artsprofessionals. John Irving, Duncan Boutwood, Roddy Hawkins

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In recent years it has been the practice to have the Le Huray Lecture, given annually in memory of the English musicologist and organist Peter le Huray (1930–92) at the Annual Conference. This year’s lecture, given by Jim Samson of Royal Holloway, was on ‘Greece and its Neighbours’, and was an examination of three ‘stories’, involving the traditional music of Greek-Albanian Epirus, art music and the border between Greece and its northern communist neighbours during the Cold War, and popular music and the border between Greece and Turkey. All this, with the addition of a lecture-recital at nearby St Pancras Church by Emilie Crapoulet on the question of the significance of the titles of Debussy’s piano Préludes, and their placement at the end of the pieces to which they relate, made for a very full and rich programme. Somehow there was also time for a memorable conference dinner at Rasa Samudra, a South Indian restaurant in Charlotte Street that is rapidly becoming the usual venue for meals after RMA events at the Institute of Musical Research.Our thanks are due to the members of the programme committee, for conceiving and putting together such an excellent programme, to all who participated, to the IMR and its director John Irving for hosting the conference, to Valerie James, its Administrator, who was responsible for the entire administration of the conference, and the team of student helpers who worked so hard to ensure that the conferenceran smoothly and helped make it the success it was.

The Symphony Orchestra as Cultural Phenomenon


Doing Ethnomusicology: Implications and Applications

The National Graduate Conference for Ethnomusicology, held in September at the Institute of Musical Research in London, presented a diversity of approaches from current graduate students in ethnomusicology and related music disciplines. The conference was themed ‘Doing Ethnomusicology: implications and applications’ in anticipation of the Research Excellence Framework which will include an assessment of the impact of research. Papers ranged from the more traditional end of ethnomusicology such as Jyoshna Joanne Latrobe’s detailed account of devotional singing in Bengal, India; to the technological such as Francis Ward’s virtual fieldwork examining the transmission of Irish traditional music through youtube and Skype; to the global such as Irfan Zuberi’s study of the commercialisation of khanquhi qawwali in India. Ethnomusicology ‘at home’ was also well represented in papers examining British pan performance, musical scenes in Chester, and religious music in London. Future directions of Ethnomusicology were also on the agenda. Caroline Bithell argued during the ‘professional trajectories’ roundtable that ethnomusicology is a growth discipline; certainly the broadness of its scope as seen at this conference will facilitate the future proliferation of ethnomusicologists in academia! And as Fiona Magowan argued during a lively final roundtable discussion on ‘ethnomusicology, activism and the public sphere’, the requirement to assess the ‘impact’ of research may affect Ethnomusicology as a discipline in unexpected ways, as the impact is difficult if not impossible to gauge before starting a piece of research. Tia DeNora’s keynote speech provided another example of a discipline extending itself to ask old questions in new ways. DeNora is, of course, a sociologist, and her paper ‘Music’s Impact: Toward a Strongest Possible Case’, suggested ways in which the socio-cultural study of music can be a tool to explore questions of performing identities and ontological security. This paper was based on DeNora’s ongoing ethnography of community music therapy, asking how music can help develop transferable skills for the ‘presentation of self ’. As with the best conferences, the most stimulating intellectual discussion went on in the coffee breaks and in the pub. As someone migrating from an alien discipline (sociology), I was left wondering whether the fact that we were all studying the same cultural artefact, music, gave us enough in common to make a distinct discipline out of us. I explored this question during coffee-break discussions over ‘what is ethnomusicology?’ and ‘what’s the difference between ethnomusicology and musical anthropology?’, questions prompted by the diversity of approaches, research areas, and styles of research (if I can use so vague a term) in the papers presented. I found it especially exciting to be in such a vibrant graduate student environment where we owned the space, allowing me to ask all manner of stupid questions. The convenors, Carolyn Landau and Emma Brinkhurst, academic advisor Barley Norton, and indefatigable administrator Valerie James, did a superb job of organising the event and creating an open and welcoming space for us. Watch out for the next graduate student conference, which is scheduled for September 12 – 14, 2012.Thomas Wagner

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Middle East and Central Asia Music ForumThe Middle East and Central Asia Music Forum was established in 2007 to provide an opportunity for those researching the musics of the region to meet and share their work with others. The Forum meets twice a year, usually in Senate House. The first meeting of the 2009-10 academic year was, however, held on Friday November 6th in the Music Department at City University, London. The first half of the morning focused on Iran, specifically the role of music and mediating technologies at times of political change or unrest. Julian Harris discussed the ways in which the Shia mourning rituals of

Moharram – and its associated music - in late 1978 provided a focus which brought together different social groups in their joint opposition to the Shah and went on to consider the ways in which cassette technology was used to spread the sermons of Ayatollah Khomeini within Iran in the lead up to the February 1979 revolution, and the role of revolutionary anthems after the revolution. Despite a gap of 30 years, there were many threads connecting this paper and the next, presented by Laudan Nooshin on the role of music in the June 2009 presidential elections: both the official and unofficial campaign songs prior to the elections, and the extraordinary musical responses after the contested election result, almost all of it mediated through the internet.


Thomas Solomon concluded the morning by drawing on recent fieldwork in Istanbul, to consider the ways in which Ayben, perhaps the best-known female rapper in Turkey, negotiates family and wider social expectations of her as a young, Turkish, Muslim woman, as against her choice to perform in public as a rapper. Tom focused both on Ayben’s expression of alternative female subjectivities through her music and her attempt to make the female ‘voice’ heard. The afternoon began with a lecture-recital by pianist Tara Kamangar - ‘A Journey Through the Piano Music of Iran’. This was followed by ‘Home and Away: Music Listening and the BBC in Iran’ presented by Leili Sreberny Mohammadi which drew on her recent ethnographic work with young people in Tehran, exploring listening tastes and trends, and focusing in particular on the place of the BBC Persian Service in listening habits. The paper touched on many topical themes including questions of youth culture, identity, modernity and cosmopolitanism.A screening of the film ‘The Glass House’ (2008) by Hamid Rahmanian and Melissa Hibbard concluded the day. This documentary on the work of the Tehran-based charity, Omid-e Mehr, which provides vocational training and therapeutic support for young women from disadvantaged and abusive backgrounds showed a side of Iranian society often hidden from view. One of the young women featured is a poet who has turned to rapping, both as a means of self-therapy and as an outlet for social and personal comment.

The spring Forum was held on Friday May 7th, 2010, at Senate House and began with a composers’ panel featuring Seth Ayyaz (PhD student, City University London) and Raiomond Mirza (independent composer).Seth discussed his use of fragments of music recorded in Morocco - including from various religious ceremonies, some involving trance - in his compositions. He explored some of the ethical issues raised, particularly in relation to making recordings in restricted environments. Raiomond also played examples of his own compositions, mainly film music commissions and discussed issues of representation, particularlyin relation to the requirements of producers – who in turn respond to expected audience demands - and his own compositional choices. This was followed by a paper by Rachel Harris in which she discussed her involvement with the London Ughyur Ensemble and the implications of this in relation to broader identity politics in China, particularly following the ethnic violence of July 2009 in the Ughyur province of Xinjiang. The paper considered both the role of the internet in linking diasporic Ughyur communities outside China and the Chinese government’s extreme anxiety about this; and also questions of representation of Uyghur music via the internet.In the first of two papers on Lebanon, Marina de Giorgi presented findings from recent fieldwork with underground musicians in Beirut, examining how the gay music scene offers musicians and audiences a space within which to openly express their sexuality in a way which is not possible in everyday society. Clare Launchbury then described a project documenting some of the recent traumatic history of Lebanon and considered the possible role of music in this ‘animation of memory’. In the final paper of the day, Saida Daukeyeva discussed the place of the instrumental narrative genre küi - which has historically played a role in passing on memories and oral lore - among diasporic Kazakhs in western Mongolia. The day ended with a book launch for Music and the Play of Power in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia, ed. Laudan Nooshin (Ashgate Press), with music provided by the London Ughyur Ensemble and John Baily and Veronica Doubleday.

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British Library Manuscripts Training Day, 27 October

Building on previous successes in medieval and renaissance fields, the IMR was pleased to sponsor a specialist research training event held at the British Library in which a group of PhD students worked in fine detail with manuscript specialists Sandra Tuppen and Nicolas Bell on holdings relating to 19th- and 20th-century British music. One of the participants, Martin Ward writes:

Unsure of exactly what to expect at the Manuscripts Research Training Day we were warmly welcomed by music curators Dr Sandra Tuppen and Dr Nicolas Bell, who led the training for the day. Although there were only four postgraduates on the course we represented a range of different research interests. Despite being at different stages in our individual research we were united by our interest in twentieth century British music.


Musicology in theDigital Age

The ‘Musicology in the Digital Age’ Study Day on 26 April featured five papers and a group discussion, all focusing on how computation and digitisation are revolutionising the way that musicological research is conducted. David Bretherton (Southampton) described the work of the ‘musicSpace’ project in developing technologies for integrating data sources, improving the ‘granularity’ of music metadata, and building better search user interfaces. Polina Proutskova (Goldsmiths) previewed some of her doctoral research on the benefits that e-research techniques and technologies can bring to the workflows of ethnomusicologists, particularly with respect to data analysis and management, and dissemination. Vanessa Hawes (UEA) focused on the philosophical issues of considering music as a kind of information. Vanessa argued that this represents a paradigmatic shift in our conceptualisation of music, and concluded that, although ostensibly positivist, computational musicology is in fact not free from operator and system bias. Tim Crawford (Goldsmiths) identified and discussed three important concerns of computational musicology: the acquisition of encoded musical material; the relationship between data mining and expert judgement; and the

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The training introduced us to interpretation of editorial marks (with its accompanying terminology) found on manuscripts, using, for the most part, manuscripts by composers related to our research. Later on the curators shared manuscripts of other British composers held at the British Library to demonstrate the different working methods and approaches to composing. I think it is fair to say that we all displayed a child-like excitement at some point when an autographed score penned by composers we are either studying or are interested in was placed in front of us. The day was extremely useful and a good introduction to understanding musical sketches and manuscripts for those students who are working with these materials as part of their research. For me, the training was at a perfect point in my research - just before I spend copious amounts of time trawling through manuscripts at the British Library and RCM. Dr Tuppen and Dr Bell tailored the materials to each individual need and did so in a way that showed passion for their work. Even for those who might not work directly with sketches, it was an interesting insight into the ways in which early twentieth century British composers work.

IMR/CeReNeM composition masterclasses at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival

A collaborative enterprise between the IMR and the Department of Music at the University of Huddersfield from 18-20 November led to nine talented postgraduate composition students from Huddersfield, Trinity College of Music, the Royal Northern College of Music, Birmingham Conservatoire, the University of Sheffield, Goldsmiths College, University of London and the University of Aberdeen participating in the Huddersfield Autumn Composers’ Symposium 2010 at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. Students had the opportunity to work with the Festival’s featured composers Rebecca Saunders, Howard Skempton and Jennifer Walshe.Many thanks are due to Prof Liza Lim (Huddersfield University) for this initiative – a natural extension of previous IMR collaborative composition workshops at the Royal Academy of Music, RNCM and Birmingham University. Liza writes:

During each masterclass, three PhD students selected from universities around the country had the opportunity to present and discuss their work with one of the internationally renowned composers featured during the festival. Jennifer Walshe (Brunel University), Howard Skempton (Birmingham Conservatoire) and Rebecca Saunders (Berlin) provided inspiring guidance to the participants who presented an extremely diverse range of work covering instrumental scores to song cycle, electroacoustic work, music theatre and text composition. The event provided a fascinating overview of the concerns of postgraduate composers nationally and indeed internationally, with participants coming from the Dominican Republic, Chile, Australia, Columbia and the United States as well as England and Scotland.Articles from each of the participating composers will be published in the next CeReNeM journal and short video excerpts from the event will be posted online at www.cerenem.org in December.


necessity of reductionism. Alan Marsden’s (Lancaster) keynote described his research designing algorithms for the computational analysis of the voice-leading relationships between Mozart’s themes and their variations. His findings – that at the middleground level a theme is no more similar to its own variations than it is to another theme’s variations – reflect, he speculated, that ‘reductive’ Schenkerian analysis tends towards homogeneity. Alan concluded by outlining some of the issues facing would-be computational musicologists, and this led into the day’s closing group discussion. David Bretherton

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Performativity, Poetry, Creation: Investigating the Creative Space of Live

Art Song PerformanceSingers and pianists are ‘creative’ in a live performance context. On this point, we can quite confidently state, we broadly agree. And yet when we ask exactly how the musicians are creative in performance – by which artistic mechanism, for example, or through which part of the piece – scholarly vocabulary typically fails. ‘The singer draws on personal experience to express the essence of the text,’ we might say, or ‘The work channels universals that are offered for our contemplation in performance.’ Neither notion is what scholars would call ‘measurable’ or ‘immutable’, and neither invites the sort of questions that are appropriate to empirical scrutiny. Indeed, even the most pragmatic enthusiasts use notoriously woolly language to describe what happens in a live concert setting.Do the qualities described in these reviews reside (if they exist at all) in the musical and poetic text or in the performers, or are they manifest somewhere else entirely? Is it all ‘magic’, or can we develop a meaningful critical language for speaking about the phenomenon of live performance that will illuminate the act of performance, rather than either the process of preparation for performance, or performance’s remnants?New questions such as these require new approaches, and new approaches, in turn, require new methods of enquiry. Our meeting on 18 May addressed the question of creativity in art song performance by identifying and openinga new critical window: that of a possible shared ‘performative’ potential in

both the act of live art song performance and the nature of the lyric poetic and musical text. The study day featured a series of lecture-performances, an open coaching session and a round-table discussion. Crucially, we put live experimental performances at the heart of our presentations, and both presenters and audience were invited to engage with the musicians in performance throughout the day.Our participants included professional singers, pianists, music historians, aestheticians, poets, performance studies specialists and song enthusiasts, whose shared perspectives allowed us to take important first steps toward developing an effective scholarly language for identifying and describing what happens during a live art song performance event. Our venue, the Institute of Musical Research in the School of Advanced Study, London, provided a unique opportunity to step into the uncharted territory between established institutions – musicology, performance studies, professional performance and pedagogy, and poetry and literature. The study day offered a new critical platform on which to collaborate both about performance and through performance from widely differing perspectives to see what new insights might emerge. We began our day with three clear intentions: 1. To investigate how musicians may be ‘creative’ in live art song performance, and to probe the possible connections between the act of song performance and the notion of the ‘lyric’ in poetry and music; 2. To take the first steps toward establishing a new critical language for discussing the act of live art song performance that would be useful across disciplines; and 3. To assemble cross-institutionally on a new platform designed to allow us to see more clearly, and to learn from, each other’s quite different perspectives on art song performance with a view to gaining new insight into its nature. The day was strongly successful on all three counts.Kathryn Whitney (co-convener, with Amanda Glauert)


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Second SMA International Summer School, University of Durham, September 2010

The SMA’s International Summer School aims to provide postgraduate participants with an advanced analytical toolkit for use in their research and teaching and a forum for the exchange of ideas at an international level. It was launched last year in collaboration with the IMR and the publishers of Music Analysis, Wiley-Blackwell. Good news travels fast and this year thirty-two students from North America, Europe, the Middle-East, Asia and Australasia gathered in Durham for an intensive week of seminars and plenary sessions culminating in a symposium on ‘New Perspectives on Musical Form’. The programme was led by five UK tutors: William Drabkin (Southampton), Julian Horton (University College, Dublin), Adam Krims (Nottingham), Michael Spitzer (Liverpool), and Richard Widdess (SOAS), and the spirit of distinguished keynote speaker, William Caplin (McGill University, Montreal), denied access to the UK at Heathrow by zealous visa officials. The quality of the teaching was outstanding, providing master classes ranging through Schenkerian and neo-Riemannian theory to analysis of Indian raga, riff-based popular music and Emotional Theory as a basis for grounding hermeneutic interpretation. The opportunity to observe a range of advanced teaching styles was also greatly appreciated by the students. A number of themes emerged across the week. The ethics of certainty and ambiguity in methodological approaches and as modes of valuing research outcomes surfaced on several occasions. The lack of cultural entrenchment evidenced by the group in discussion around this topic was edifying. This led to particularly high quality debates on segmentation in Classical Sonata form. The group also united around a general desire to present music theory in the academy as much more than the institutionalised study of sonic regulations. Ideas were proposed around the integration of theory into performance and composition practice as well as historical musicology – ideas that might form useful focal themes for future Summer Schools. The highlights of the week showed how theory for theory’s sake can be exhilarating and even revelatory however. Julian Horton’s remarkable session on the Tristan Chord presented a view of its functionality that not only synthesised many other previously eminent theories but also made astounding musical sense of the close of the music-drama. It was a privilege to hear the debut of this important work which demands publication. William Drabkin’s historically situated introduction to Schenker led, via a lucid introduction to the principles of the technique, to dynamic interpretations of works by Bach and Mozart. Michael Spitzer, covering for William Caplin, clearly articulated competing theories of sonata form and then melded these with persuasive heuristic readings of Beethoven. The vital role of theory and analysis in the field of ethnomusicology was evinced by Richard Widdess’s erudite introduction to hybrid ragas. He showed how pitch-based techniques could make audible processes of integration and separation thereby enriching our understanding of music from the North Indian Classical Tradition. Popular music is now a standard component of most music faculty undergraduate courses and the seat of prior learning for many undergraduates faced with an introductory course to music theory and analysis. The challenge of adapting analytical methods to non-score based ‘texts’ and the discovery of formal functions in riff-based Rock music were entertainingly presented by Adam Krims. The final day of the Summer School was devoted to a symposium of papers presented by the course tutors (William Caplin’s keynote paper was ably read and defended by his student Nathan Martin) and guest speakers Max Paddison and Shay Loya. It was a pity that more members of the wider community of music analysts did not attend – pressures of the new academic year notwithstanding. The papers opened up interesting discussion on broader issues of form in Romantic and contemporary repertoire.The Summer School undoubtedly achieved and in many ways exceeded its main aims. In creating a phalanx of postgraduate music theorists who are better prepared for the intellectual and institutional battles ahead it will strengthen the position of the discipline as a whole. Those who were lucky enough to take part will no doubt employ the intense training they have received and cherish the international connections that have been made. Special thanks go to SMA Chair Michael Spitzer for founding the Summer School and to Jo Buckley at Durham University for administering the course with panache.

Helen Thomas


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Medieval Song Network Workshop 2010The first of a pair of workshops hosted by the newly-established Medieval Song Network was held in Senate House, University of London, on 6th and 7th September 2010 and attended by around fifty national and international participants including from Paris, Utrecht, Sydney, Toronto and the US. The Medieval Song Network was set up by Ardis Butterfield and Helen Deeming in order to enable discussion and collaboration across disciplines about all aspects of medieval song. In June 2010 they were awarded £36,840 from the AHRC Research Networking Scheme to hold two workshops and a linked performance event in September 2010 and September 2011. The September workshop took the form of several thematically focused sessions, each of which consisted of a small number of short case-study presentations, usually from specialists in different disciplines, followed by an extended open discussion. Sessions were dedicated to digital resources; to online archives of English, Dutch, and French lyrics in manuscripts with music; liturgical and sermon contexts; and authorship and attribution. A further three sessions discussed interpretation and performance: circulation and transmission; music and poetry; interpreting and communicating song. The workshop concluded with a final discussion of possible ways in which the network may move forward. The aim of this initial Medieval Song Network workshop was to facilitate the development of ideas for manageable and workable projects for continued discussion next year. The following areas were proposed as ways of enabling new, cross-disciplinary approaches to medieval song:

• a vocabulary and glossary of terms for song, both in modern scholarly discourse and medieval terminology • methodology for dealing with memory, a crucial part of performance and song• authorship: locating individual authors, and going beyond authorship to think about collaboration and patronage• the aspects of performance that make music important culturally• dialect, to identify how and where songs were received and transmitted• sharing information about rhyme, metre and presence of musical notation across different linguistic repertories

An interactive site, linked to the existing one, is being constructed which will enable Network members to post comments and other material including audio/video recordings, ask and respond to questions, and disseminate news of current research. A further feature will be a fully searchable and interactive bibliography. Several other collaborative plans are in progress to co-ordinate access to databases, provide new online tools and develop interdisciplinary dialogue. The Network seeks to promote medieval song and make it accessible to a wider audience. Plans are thus underway in partnership with The Orlando Consort for next year’s workshop and performance day on 12-14 September, which will include a concert on Tuesday 13 September 2011 at the Priory Church of St Bartholomew the Great, West Smithfield.

IMR Visiting FellowsWe have recently welcomed the following new Visiting Fellows:

Professor Roberta Montemorra Marvin (University of Iowa), July 2010 Cheong, Dr Wai Ling (The Chinese University of Hong Kong), September 2010 Dr Ikuko Inugochi, November 2010 - January 2011


Publication for IMR Early Career Associate

IMR Early Career Associate Alex Constansis is working on transgender vocal techniques and some of his current work will be included in the new edition of the book Voice Therapy and Communication for the TG Client (Plural Publishing, c. 2012) in a chapter entitled ‘FTM Considerations’ co-authored with Richard Adler and John Van Borsel. Alex will be giving a ‘Directions in Musical Research’ seminar on his recent work at the IMR on 5 May 2011.

Being an Associate - benefits

• Free invitation to an annual IMR Associates’ lecture or recital in London giving you an opportunity to meet other IMR supporters.• Early notice of special events • Personal copy of the events programme for each term either by post or by email• Personal copy of the twice-yearly newsletter either by post or by email• If you wish it, acknowledgement of your support in our literature and on our website

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Join us

To become an Associate we request a minimum annual donation of £20 (£10 for the unwaged). The membership year runs from 1 August to 31 July. Your contribution will be used across the range of IMR activities, to sustain and develop established projects and to pump-prime new initiatives.

Contact Details

The Institute of Musical Research Tel: 020 7664 4865School of Advanced Study Fax: 020 7664 4867University of LondonSenate House Email: [email protected] StreetLondon WC1E 7HU www.music.sas.ac.uk

IMR Annual Report for 2009-10The Annual Report for 2009-10 will not be published in hard copy this year but will be available to read on the IMR website www.music.sas.ac.uk.

Towards the end of the 2009-10 session, the IMR was pleased to welcome another study group into the fold: ICONEA, the International Conference of Near Eastern Archaeomusicology, directed by Richard Dumbrill and Irving Finkel.

ICONEA

The IMR has also been pleased to welcome RIdIM, (Répertoire International d’Iconographie Musicale) Administrator Debra Pring

to share its office space and and we look forward to a long and fruitful association with this important international organisation charged with the methodologies and cataloguing of musical iconography on a worldwide basis.

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