Monthly Archives: September 2014

Joe Perkins (MA Composition) Reflects on his Summer Internship

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Joe Perkins (pictured, right) graduated from the BMus programme in July 2014 and has spent this summer completing an internship with award-winning production company Brains and Hunch before he commences the MA in Composition at City this September. We asked him about his experience of the internship:

‘My recent internship with Tom Haines and Chris Branch at ‘Brains and Hunch – Music for Moving Image’ has been an invaluable experience. My understanding of work in a professional studio, such as recording techniques, equipment maintenance, administration, and collaborative work, have all been greatly improved. My other responsibilities involved working with various different theatre companies, such as Filter Theatre and Shunt Events. I have also been assistant sound engineer for a production called ‘The Circus’, which was performed at Edinburgh Fringe this year. This introduced me to new software such as Qlab and Soundflower. In addition, I have been offered further work with Shunt Theatre as a regular performer with my Gypsy Jazz ensemble, ‘Nouveau Gadjo’. My mentors Tom and Chris have helped me greatly with my understanding of composing for moving image, various recording and mixing techniques, an understanding of analog synthesizers/sequencers, Max MSP, Pro Tools and instrument building. I would highly recommend the internship experience!’

 

PhD student Rachel Hayward to present paper at International Steel Pan Conference at University of East London

The University of East London will be hosting the 5th biennial Steel Pan Conference over the weekend of 11-12th October. This collaborative project aims to bring together academics and practitioners to examine the ways in which the three strands of the Caribbean Carnival arts (pan, masquerade and calypso) are interwoven and have been adapted and adopted around the globe. Outside of its home country — Trinidad — pan in particular has suffered from a lack of academic attention despite long traditions in other Caribbean islands, the USA and UK — a deficit this series of conferences has attempted to address. City University PhD student Rachel Hayward has been invited to give the opening paper entitled ‘Yellow Bird’ and Pan: Caribbean Musical Migrations based upon research undertaken for her recently submitted thesis. Also a respected performer, Rachel will be performing The Birmingham Spirituals by Patrick Larley which includes a specially composed part for solo pan within the orchestra. The work will be performed along with other solo pan transcriptions at St Paul’s Church, Chichester on 4th October.

Joanna Bailie: Recent Activities

IMG_2173_1PhD student Joanna Bailie was invited this summer to join the teaching staff at the 47th Darmstadt International Summer Course for New Music. As well as tutoring over forty composition students from a wide variety of cultures and musical backgrounds, she was a composer-mentor at the percussion workshop and presented a paper during the Darmstadt lecture series entitled “Towards a poetics of sampling: embracing the gap” which can be heard at:

https://voicerepublic.com/venues/lectures/talks/die-lucke-schliessen-zu-einer-poetik-des-sampling

She also had two works programmed at the summer course — Street-Souvenir was performed by the young French ensemble Soundinitiative, and On and Off 2 by students from the percussion department.

July 2014 saw the publication of Stephanie Power’s article “Joanna Bailie: strange parallel music” in Tempo. The article presents a general overview of Bailie’s career and works with a particular focus on her more recent pieces involving field recording and intermediality. Joanna is currently working on her first orchestral piece, entitled To be beside the seaside, which will be premiered in May 2015 by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra.

PhD Student Christina Michael Presents in Germany and Greece

Christina Michael

 

Christina Michael, who is in the third year of her PhD at City, will be delivering a conference paper on the 30th of September entitled ‘Issues of Authenticity and National Identity in Greek Popular Music: The Entechno Laiko [art-popular] tradition’. Her paper will be part of  The Languages of Popular Music: Communicating Regional Musics in a Globalized World conference, which will take place in Osnabruck, Germany between 29th of September and the 2nd of October 2014.

Following this, Christina will be presenting a paper on the 2nd of October entitled ‘The employment of cultural and musical continuity in Manos Hadjidakis’ 1949 Lecture on Rebetiko’ for the conference Continuities, Discontinuities, Ruptures in the Greek World (1204-2014): Economy, Society, History, Literature, which will take place in Thessaloniki, Greece between the 2nd and 5th of October 2014.