In the first week of July, Laudan Nooshin presented a keynote paper at the conference ‘Analysis, Cognition and Ethnomusicology’, a joint meeting of the 3rd ‘Analytical Approaches to World Music’ and the 2014 annual meeting of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology. The conference was hosted by the Institute of Musical Research, University of London, and the School of Oriental and African Studies, in association with the Centre for Music and Science (University of Cambridge) and the Society for Music Analysis, and was attended by over 200 people, including delegates from across the UK and from abroad. This was one of the first conferences to bring together ethnomusicologists, music analysts and music psychologists to discuss ways of approaching the study of music that would benefit from drawing on each of these areas.
Laudan’s paper was entitled ‘Re-imagining DIfference: Musical Analysis, Alterity and the Creative Process’ and explored a number of issues around the intersection of musical analysis and alterity arising from her long-term research on improvisation in Iranian classical music. The keynote was chaired by Laudan’s former PhD supervisor, Professor John Baily from Goldsmiths’ College.
The other keynote speakers at the conference were Professor Nicholas Cook (University of Cambridge) with a paper entitled ‘Music, Identity, and the Clever Boy from Croydon’ about the life and music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor; and Professor Martin Clayton (University of Durham) speaking about ‘Music Analysis and Ethnomusicology: Some Reflections on Rhythmic Theory’.