On 21st November two members of Music staff presented papers as part of the Royal Musical Association’s Study Day on ‘Researching music as process: methods and approaches’, hosted by the Faculty of Music, Oxford University.
Dr Laudan Nooshin’s paper ‘Between a rock and a hard place: discourse, practice and the unbearable lightness of analysis. Methodological challenges in studying creative process in Iranian (classical) music’ presented a case-study of two Iranian musicians, Amir Eslami and Hooshyar Khayam, as a means of uncovering some of the methodological challenges of analysing and understanding creative process in ethnomusicology. Dr Diana Salazar presented a paper on a practice-led collaboration with dancer Maria Salgado Llopis, entitled ‘Corporeal cartography: navigating process in the development of an expressive system for dance, improvisation and sonic art’. This presentation examined approaches to documentation and reflection during the development of a work for interactive dance and sound.