Author Archives: sbbd746

Ben Schoeman (DMA) gives performances at the National Arts Festival in South Africa

City University DMA student, pianist Ben Schoeman, has given concerts at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown, South Africa. At the prestigious Gala Concert of this event on 30 June 2013, Schoeman performed Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue with the KwaZulu-Natal Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of conductor Richard Cock. The prominent South African critic Jeff Brukman (Head of the Music Department at Rhodes University) described his performance as “a sensitive interpretation” and wrote that “compositional features and inner-voiced thematic material were highlighted through Schoeman’s careful voicing of the richly-hued tapestry” (Cue Newspaper, Grahamstown). On 2 July Schoeman gave a solo recital at the National Arts Festival. His programme included works of Haydn, Schumann, Wagner-Liszt as well as the South African composer Surendran Reddy.

During his South African visit, Ben Schoeman also gave two chamber music recitals in collaboration with his duo-partner cellist Anzél Gerber. The two musicians won the first prize in the IBLA Grand Prize Competition in Italy (2012). Their first recital took place at the ZK Matthews Great Hall of the University of South Africa on 23 June and was described by the critic Thys Odendaal (Beeld newspaper) as “an ecstatic performance that can surely be described as a highlight of Pretoria’s concert calendar for this year”. On 1 July the Gerber/Schoeman Duo repeated their programme to a capacity audience at the National Arts Festival in Grahamstown. The following review appeared in the Cue Newspaper (Wednesday 3 July 2013): http://cue.ru.ac.za/2013/07/moments-of-virtuosity/

Travel Awards from Sempre for City Students

We are delighted to announce that two of City’s postgraduate students have been awarded Gerry Farrell Travelling Scholarships by the Society for Education, Music and Psychology Research (SEMPRE).

MA student Sam Mackay was awarded a scholarship to help fund research in the city of Marseilles. The research, focusing on grassroots music scenes, cultural policy, and urban change, is now being written up as Sam’s MA dissertation.

Miranda Crowdus, currently in the 2nd year of her PhD, received a scholarship of £1900 to allow her to complete fieldwork for her doctoral thesis – which focuses on Palestinian-Israeli music, cross-cultural networks, and social protest in South Tel Aviv and Jaffa – as well as undertake an intensive language programme at Tel Aviv University over the summer.

The SEMPRE travel scholarship scheme was set up in memory of Gerry Farrell (1951-2003), an ethnomusicologist and fine sitar player who wrote extensively on all aspects of Indian music, ethnomusicology and music education. Gerry was Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at City University London from 1995 to 2003, and we are therefore particularly delighted that two City students have received the generous support of SEMPRE this year.

Ed Pick to take up position at Wells Cathedral School

A recent graduate of the DMA degree, Edward Pick, has secured a position as a full-time accompanist at Wells Cathedral School, Somerset, starting this September.

Ed’s DMA research was on ‘‘Tonality in Schoenberg’s Music with Particular Reference to the Piano Concerto’. His studies were supervised by Professor Rhian Samuel at City and Ronan O’Hora at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama.

Ed is very much looking forward to taking up his position at Wells and working in such an exciting musical environment.

Oxford Maqam at City

On 14th May 2013, the Centre for Music Studies was delighted to welcome the group Oxford Maqam, The Madeleine Quartet and members of the King’s College London Big Band to perform the rarely heard operetta Majnoun Laila by Egyptian composer and singer Abd al-Wahhab (1902-91), together with songs from the 1950s and 60s by another prominent singer, Abd al-Halim Hafez (1929-77).

Oxford Maqam is led by Professor Martin Stokes, King’s College London, who also presented a pre-concert talk with band members Tarik Beshir and Yara Salahideen, about the reconstruction of Majnoun Lailla and some of the performance issues raised: ‘The performance is an unusual attempt to restore some elements of the revolutionary soundworld of the early recordings, one that has long since disappeared in Egyptian contemporary performance practice’.

Despite the heavy rain that evening, the musicians performed to a packed Performance Space, bringing in many people from outside City interested in Egyptian music of the early to mid-20th century.

Rachel Hayward directs Gibraltar steel band debut

Gibraltar’s first steel band made its debut in April under the direction of City PhD student Rachel Hayward. Royal Gibraltar Regimental Band Leader, Craig Philbin, aims to nurture community music-making on the Rock. Inspired by the bands he heard in Jamaica, he contacted Rachel to help initiate the project.

Rachel introduced members of the Regimental Band to traditional Trinidadian Carnival songs, ran workshops with local school children, and trained up two youth groups who then performed and won both their classes in the Rock’s Youth Music Festival. The cadets’ pipe and drum corp so wowed the adjudicator with their performance of Toots and the Maytals’ ska classic ‘Monkey Man’ that they were invited to open the gala concert the following week. Craig is now looking to treble the size of the project and fly Rachel back as soon as possible to further the cause of pan on the Rock.

Middle Eastern Ensemble perform at Rostam School, Parliament Hill School, Highgate

On Saturday 18th May 2013, City’s Middle Eastern Ensemble gave a captivating performance to an audience of students, staff and parents at the prestigious Rostam Saturday Farsi (Persian) School.

The performance included rhythmic as well as instrumental and vocal pieces. The daf frame drums, tombak goblet-shaped drum and darbuka were used in the rhythm section while the melody section was made up of more standard Western instruments: violins, clarinet, guitar and flute.

The vocal piece was based on a poem by the renowned 13-century Iranian poet, Molana (Rumi). The melody based on the ancient 17-beat cycle called “khosh-rang”, meaning “beautiful colours”,  attracted a lot of interest as did the song based on the poem by Molana.

Liam Cagney awarded Paul Sacher Foundation Scholarship

PhD student Liam Cagney has been awarded a prestigious scholarship from the Paul Sacher Foundation in Basel, Switzerland.

The Sacher Foundation is ‘an international research center for the music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with some hundred estates and collections from leading composers and performers.’ Among the composers for whom collections are held at the Foundation are Stravinsky, Boulez, Ligeti, and Webern.

Liam will spend March and April 2014 researching the Gérard Grisey Collection at the Sacher Foundation. This research is part of Liam’s PhD project, entitled ‘The Development of French Spectral Music, 1972-1982, with a particular focus on the music of Gérard Grisey’.

In other activity, Liam recently had an article published by Sinfini Music on new music from Ireland. Featuring interviews with composers Donnacha Dennehy and Ed Bennett, the article can be read online here: http://sinfinimusic.com/uk/features/2013/04/feature-contemporary-irish-music/

Liam also has two review articles in the May issue of Opera Magazine.

Marie Saunders presents at Symposium on “Love and Sentimentalism in Popular Music”

PhD student Marie Saunders will be taking part in a Symposium organised by the Music Department at Holloway University, to be held on 27th-28th June. The Symposium is called “Love and Sentimentalism in Popular Music”.

Marie’s contribution will form part of the “Migration, Displacement and Emplacement” session of the Symposium. The title of her paper is “Burns’ Popular Songs and a Scottish Identity”.

 

Christina Michael presents at Mastering the Mix symposium

PhD student Christina Michael will be presenting at the symposium MASTERING THE MIX: Interdisciplinarity in Musicology and Compositional Practice, which is going to be held on the 4th of June at Oxford Brooks University.

In the presentation Christina will focus on Manos Hadjidakis’ compositions for ancient Greek drama and the ways in which certain elements of authenticity and national identity are constantly raised. There will be a discussion over the so-called ‘Greekness’ of those works as well as a discussion on alleged relations to anterior genres of Greek music that lead to theories of musical continuity. Furthermore, there will be a specific focus on the shift of ‘art’ music to ‘popular’ on the stage of ancient Greek drama and the bridging of the chasm between the two through the creation of a new hybrid genre of music in Greece during the 1950s, that of the ‘art-popular’ tradition [entechno laiko].