Earlier this month – from Saturday 3rd to Monday 5th September – the Royal Musical Association held its annual conference at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. This is the largest annual gathering of musicologists in the UK and City University staff and recent alumni were well represented. On the Sunday, new City lecturer Claudia Molitor spoke on a panel entitled ’Site and Sound: Practice-Based Explorations of Music and Space’, presenting a paper on one of her recent compositions, Sonorama, an audio work for the train journey between London St Pancras and Margate which offers sounds and voices for the otherwise silent view from the train. Speaking on the same day, Miguel Mera’s paper, ’The Comedy of Audio-Visual Musicality’, was part of a panel on the topic of ‘Music and Musician on Screen’. Laudan Nooshin present on a panel sponsored by the British Forum for Ethnomusicology on ‘Music in Contested Urban Space’. Her paper explored the ways in which the city of Tehran is represented, imagined and claimed through the music videos of Iranian hip-hop artist Hichkas. On Monday 5th , Ian Pace presented a paper on a panel organised by the RMA Music and/as Process Study Group on ‘Creative Performance Processes as Research’. His paper was entitled ‘Between Academia and Audiences: Some Critical and Methodological Reflections from a Performer-Scholar’. Also presenting at the conference was recent PhD alumnus, Liam Cagney, who is now teaching at University College Dublin. His paper was entitled ‘Ensemble L’Itineraire’s Role in the Establishment of French Spectral Music.

The photos below show City staff in action at the conference: