Author Archives: sbbd746

Professor Stephen Cottrell inaugural lecture and book launch, Tuesday February 5th

Professor Stephen Cottrell

Mad, Bad and Dangerous to Blow: the Saxophone as a Musical Miscreant

The saxophone is one of the most recognised musical instruments in the world. Loved by many, loathed by some, in the early twenty-first century it has both a musical and symbolic significance far beyond that for which its inventor, Adolphe Sax, might reasonably have hoped.

It also has a chequered history. Originally conceived in the mid-nineteenth century as a bass instrument to be included in orchestras and military bands, since then it has been found in a wide range of musical contexts, some of which have led to the instrument having at a times a very poor reputation. In the 1920s particularly, the saxophone suffered by its association with dance music and jazz, and the vilification often aimed at both. And for much of the rest of the twentieth century the instrument was often regarded with ambivalence by the musical establishment; it was enormously popular in some contexts, certainly, yet always retained something of its earlier disreputable profile.

This lecture will trace something of the saxophone’s history and development, looking at the ways inwhich the instrument’s reputation has changed over the past 170 years or so, while also demonstrating how musical instruments can reveal to us underlying social, cultural and technological precepts in the contexts in which they are found. The lecture will conclude with a short performance.

Details:
Tuesday February 5th, 6:30-8pm
Performance Space
College Building
St John Street
London EC1V 4PB

Find out more and book your place: http://www.city.ac.uk/events/2013/february/mad,-bad-and-dangerous-to-blow-the-saxophone-as-a-musical-miscreant

A small reception will follow the lecture where copies of The Saxophone, Professor Cottrell’s new monograph published by Yale University Press, will be available.

Stephen Cottrell was appointed as Professor of Music at City University London in 2010. He was a professional saxophonist for nearly two decades before moving into academia in the late 1990s. During his professional performing career he specialised in the performance of new music, commissioning works from many renowned composers and founding and leading the Delta Saxophone Quartet from 1984 to 2001. He has made numerous recordings and broadcasts, both as a soloist, with the Quartet, and with a wide variety of other ensembles. In 2001 he joined the staff of the Department of Music at Goldsmiths College London, later becoming Senior Lecturer and Head of Department. He was for many years Treasurer of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology and remains on the editorial board of the journal twentieth-century music. He has published widely, including a 2004 monograph on Professional Music-making in London (Ashgate).

Liam Cagney: Recent Publications

Second year PhD student Liam Cagney has had his work featured recently in a couple of publications.

A couple of months back Liam had an article published by Sinfini Classical. Entitled ‘When Techno Meets Classical’, the article uses the release of techno artist Max Richter’s Vivaldi Recomposed album on Deutsche Gramophone to explore other crossovers between these two very different musical genres. You can read the article (and listen to its clips) here: http://blog.sinfinimusic.com/classical-connections-3-when-techno-meets-classical/

The December issue of Opera Magazine featured a review by Liam of the American composer Robert Ashley’s opera Vidas Perfectas. A translation into Spanish of Ashley’s Perfect Lives, originally broadcast on Channel 4 in the early 1980s, Vidas Perfectas was performed recently at Hyde Park’s Serpentine Gallery.

And an extract from a short story by Liam was recently read out on national radio in Ireland. The story, entitled ‘The Party’, featured on 2 January on RTE Radio One’s flagship arts show Arena. You can listen to the extract at this link, starting around 37:10 in: http://tinyurl.com/af8jzpk

Centre for Music Studies Concert, Tuesday 13th November: Clare Hammond

Clare Hammond, a recent graduate from the Doctorate of Musical Arts programme at City University London, will give a recital in the Performance Space at 7pm on Tuesday 13 November as part of the music department’s evening concert series. Her programme will include works by Handel, Szymanowski, Beethoven and Scriabin.

Acclaimed by The Daily Telegraph as a pianist of “amazing power and panache”, Clare Hammond has performed across Europe, Russia and Canada and has appeared recently at the Wigmore and Barbican Halls in London and the Bridgewater Hall in Manchester. Her Purcell Room debut for the Park Lane Group concert series was praised by The Guardian for its “crisp precision and unflashy intelligence”.

More information is available online at Clare’s website: http://www.clarehammond.com/concerts.html.

Centre for Music Studies Research Seminar, Wednesday 14th November: Dr Elina Hytönen

The Centre for Music Studies is pleased to announce that Dr Elina Hytönen (University of Eastern Finland/King’s College London) will present at the Research Seminar Series on Wednesday 14th November. The topic of Dr Hytönen’s presentation is ‘Hidden Authorities and Gendered Positions in the Contemporary Jazz Musicians’ Work Environment’.

Wednesday 14th November 2012, 5:30-7:30pm
Room AG09, Ground Floor, College Building
City University London
EC1V 0HB

http://www.city.ac.uk/visit

All welcome.

 

Hidden Authorities and Gendered Positions in the Contemporary Jazz Musicians

Abstract:  Professional jazz musicians are an interesting mobile group who can work in different venues, and with different musicians, every night of the week, travelling long distances for gigs. It is therefore the venues that create the scene, and which consequently affect the musicians’ views of themselves and their performance. The venues offer the musicians a chance to create and maintain their identities as musicians as well as provide the place where musicians socialise, creating and maintaining critical personal and professional networks. Venues create a setting within which musicians seek and create meaning in relation to their work. These are the places where they want to feel welcome and at home. This aspect is still not widely researched. Venues and their acoustics also affect the musicians’ well-being very straightforwardly through the level of physical strain required to play effectively. Within the venues the musicians are also dependent on and constrained by technical support and sound production, club protocols and the setting itself. These factors also condition the music as the musicians arelikely to adapt to the styles and conduct that are felt appropriate to the particular setting. All these connections are multilayered and complex. This paper aims at highlighting the musicians’ point of view on how performance places create a vibrant scene with which musicians feel a strong sense of belonging. The aim is to discuss the hidden authorities and power relationsaffecting the venues and the work environment. By looking more closely at some female jazz musicians’ experiences of performance venues, I also demonstrate some of the gender differences set up by the venues and the organisations. The places where jazz is being performed are heavily gendered, creating separation between male and female musicians. The venues sometimes seem to create different set of rules and expectations for male and female musicians, which can then create friction and separation within the band.  The paper is based on on-going research that consists of interviews with professional jazz musicians and the observation of some performance venues in the United Kingdom.

Ben Schoeman performs as soloist with the Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra

On 31 October and 1 November 2012 City University student Ben Schoeman (DMA) is performing Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a theme of Paganini, Op. 43 with the Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of the American conductor Robert Maxym. The concert form part of the JPO’s fourth annual symphony season. It is one of South Africa’s prominent symphony orchestras. Ben’s performance of Liszt’s Piano Concertos nos. 1 and 2 with the Cape Philharmonic Orchestra was televised several times on South African national television during 2012.

Recent Performances by UG student Larissa Zetlein

Larissa Zetlein has been very busy performing trombone. To start the summer off she successfully got the 1st trombone job in the Central Band of the Royal British Legion, which provides a large amount of performance opportunities throughout the year. This summer with the Central Band she played at the Winter Gardens in Margate; Centre Court at Wimbledon for both the male and female finals; a week in Eastbourne at the famous Bandstand; a Long Service Ceremony for the Met Police; at the Theatre Royale in Windsor for the Windsor Festival, and even a wedding with Embassy Big Band (all musicians from Central Band).

As well as performing with the Central Band over the summer, the last weekend in September was spent in Dover recording a Christmas CD. One of the best parts of Larissa’s summer, however, came when she played in a BBC Prom on the 12th August with the National Youth Wind Orchestra. Larissa has been a member of NYWO since 2008. The NYWO’s programme was an all British one: Vaughan-Williams’ Flourish for Winds; Holst’s Suite No. 2 in F; the world premiere of Gavin Higgins’ Der Aufstand; Martin Ellerby Paris’ Sketches and finally Walton’s Crown Imperial (even making use of the Royal Albert Hall Organ for the ending).

Recent and forthcoming conference presentations by Dr Laudan Nooshin

Laudan has recently spoken at two conferences. First, she presented a paper at the Perspectives on Musical Improvisation conference at the University of Oxford, 10th to 13th September. Her paper, which was entitled  ‘Beyond the Radif: New Forms of Improvisational Practice in Iranian Music’, explored the ways in which young Iranian classical musicians are developing new approaches to improvisation which move away from the traditional repertoire known as radif which has been central to the classical tradition for the past 150 years.

 

Also in September, Laudan spoke at the British Forum for Ethnomusicology’s Graduate Conference ,’Music and Movement’, at the Institute of Musical Research, University of London, on a roundtable on research ethics. Her contribution was entitled: ‘Are Research Ethics Committees Ethical?’.

 

Forthcoming presentations include a training session on ethics for research students as part of the Institute of Musical Research’s series of training events for research students.

 

Laudan will also be presenting at the joint conference of the Society for Ethnomusicology, the American Musicological Society and the Society for Music Theory, to be held in New Orleans from 1st to 4th November. She is speaking on a panel entitled ‘Improvisation: Object of Study and Critical Paradigm’ and will share a platform with Bruno Nettl and George E. Lewis, among others.

 

‘Prince Zal and the Simorgh’: Iranian Music Education Project with the London Philharmonic Orchestra

Laudan Nooshin 

Between November 2011 and May 2012, a partnership between the Community and Education Department at the London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO) and the Centre for Music Studies at City University London introduced Iranian music, culture and story-telling to key stage 2 school children in South London. Jointly funded by the LPO, City University London and the Higher Education Innovation Fund, the project brought together composer David Bruce, storyteller Sally Pomme Clayton, Iranian musicians Arash Moradi and Fariborz Kiani, members of City University’s Middle Eastern Music Ensemble and other City students, and the Bridge Project music education programme. The project was led by myself and Patrick Bailey, head of the Community and Education Department at the LPO.

The project centred around the Iranian epic Shahnameh – ‘Book of Kings’, written by Abolqasem Ferdowsi (940-1020 CE) – and specifically the story of Prince Zal: born albino and abandoned as a baby, Zal is found and raised by the magical and wise Simorgh bird; many years later he is reconciled with his family and returns triumphantly as the new king. With its many topical themes of tolerance and forgiveness, this story proved a wonderfully rich source for use with British school children. The project began in the autumn with workshops in two South London primary schools: Jessop and Ashmole schools. The children were introduced to the melodies and rhythms of Iranian music and to the story of Prince Zal and the Simorgh, as retold in English by storyteller Sally Pomme Clayton. Through the workshops, the children created musical ideas of their own to portray characters such as the Simorgh, or the magical mountain where she lives, ideas which were later used by composer David Bruce for his orchestral piece. Also involved in the workshop were City music students – violinists Rachel Hobby and Beverley Cooper, and Christina Michael and Lucasz Kapraz on Iranian daff (frame drum) – and violin teachers from the Bridge Project, an organisation which provides instrumental teaching in socio-economically disadvantaged areas of South London, and aims to encourage the children, their families and their communities to develop a life-long appreciation for classical music. City composer Alice Jeffreys shadowed composer David Bruce.

Following the Autumn workshops, David Bruce wrote the specially- commissioned piece ‘Prince Zal and the Simorgh’, which was premiered at the Royal Festival Hall on London’s South Bank on 23rd May as part of the LPO’s Bright Sparks schools concerts series. Sally Pomme Clayton narrated the story, accompanied by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by David Angus; Arash Moradi on setār and Kurdish tanbur and Fariborz Kiani on percussion; members of the City University Middle Eastern Music Ensemble on daff frame drums –  Andrew Allen, Timothy Doyle, Christos Seas, Emma Langley and Jonathon Porter; and fifty key stage 1 violinists from Jessop and Ashmole Schools with their Bridge Project teachers. Each of the two concerts was attended by 2,500 key stage 2 children and their teachers. The central theme of the concert was telling stories through music, and as well as David Bruce’s piece the children were treated to extracts from Peter and the Wolf by Prokofiev, Swan Lake by Tchaikovsky and a very lively and enjoyable sing-along ‘I Wanna be Like You’ from The Jungle Book film, music by Richard and Robert Sherman. For many of the children, this was their first experience of a live orchestral concert and there was an air of great excitement. Presenter Andrew Barclay did a wonderful job of introducing the music, including elements of audience participation between pieces.

In the lead up to the concerts in the spring, I wrote a teacher’s pack for use in the classroom introducing pupils to Iran – the country, and its traditions of music, story telling, poetry and visual arts. The pack also included ideas and suggestions for practical classroom activities in preparation for the forthcoming concerts. Some of the teachers also participated in preparatory workshops run by the LPO Education and Community Department and led by myself and Patrick Bailey.

Several teachers gave very positive feedback on the concerts and other activities associated with the project. One of them explained, ‘In the week before the concert we used the story in our literacy lessons, describing the Simorgh, using drama and role play to investigate character and writing diary entries for Prince Zal from the different stages of the story. The children were really engaged with the story and with the drama and produced some really good writing. It exposed children to a new culture. Their listening skills were developed by using Prince Zal’s [musical] theme to understand how a character changes over the course of a story. And the concert also inspired the children in their own music-making … we also used the drumming rhythmic patterns (groups of 2 and 3 notes) from the resources pack in a mathematics lesson, working out which numbers could or could not be made by adding strings of 2s and 3s’. In another school, children painted their own pictures of the Simorgh, taking inspiration from the beautifully detailed miniature paintings of the Shahnameh stories found in old manuscripts, an example of which was included in the teacher’s pack

All in all, this was a very worthwhile and valuable project. We hope that there will be opportunities to extend this project in the future, both through school workshops and further performances of the piece, in the UK and abroad. There is also discussion about a possible children’s picture book with the accompanying music. In the current international climate, it’s hard to overstate the importance of projects like this which aim to promote greater cultural tolerance and understanding, and in particular a more positive image and understanding of Iran – its people, culture and history – than pupils might normally experience through the media and other kinds of representation. And what better way to do it than through music!

 

For further information on the project, see the links below:

http://www.lpo.org.uk/education/schools_brightsparks.html

http://www.lpo.org.uk/education/

Sally Pomme Clayton’s blog:

http://sallypommeclayton.com/blog/?p=777

David Bruce’s website:

http://www.davidbruce.net/works/prince-zal-simorgh.asp

The Bridge Project

http://www.londonmusicmasters.org/about/bridge-project/

 

‘Prince Zal and the Simorgh’ workshop, Autumn 2011. Young violinists at Ashmole School, Lambeth, with City University music student Beverley Cooper in the background.

Premiere of ‘Prince Zal and the Simorgh’ by David Bruce, LPO Bright Sparks Schools Concert, Royal Festival Hall, 23rd May 2012.

 


 

Picture of the Simorgh by Oscar Murphy of Lee Manor School, South London.


Composer David Bruce and conductor David Angus in rehearsal. Photo: Neil Matthews.

 

 

Centre for Music Studies Research Seminar, Wednesday 17th October: Professor Philip Tagg

The Centre for Music Studies is pleased to welcome Professor Philip Tagg of the University of Huddersfield to launch our latest research seminar series on Wednesday 17th October. He will give a paper entitled ‘Troubles with tonal terminology and notations of form in popular music’ which interrogates some of the problems encountered when using ‘euro-classical’ music theory to analyse popular musics. This seminar is open to all and we welcome attendance from those in other departments and from visitors from outside City University London.

Philip Tagg is a musician and composer turned musicologist with a background in both popular and art music. In 1981 he co-founded the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) and in 1991 initiated work on the Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World (EPMOW). He is an internationally recognised authority on topics like Popular Music Analysis and Music and the Moving Image. He has taught at the University of Göteborg, Université de Montréal, and University of Liverpool’s Institute of Popular Music. He is now retired and lives in Yorkshire where, as Visiting Professor at the universities of Salford and Huddersfield, he continues to write and to produce his ‘edutainment’ videos.

Professor Philip Tagg (University of Huddersfield): ‘Troubles with tonal terminology and notations of form in popular music’. Wednesday 17th October 2012, 5.30pm, in room AG09 (ground floor, College building). Free seminar – all welcome.

For more information about Professor Tagg’s work, please see his website at www.tagg.org

For more information about future research seminars, please see the University’s event page (http://www.city.ac.uk/events) or follow us on Twitter (http://twitter.com/CUMusicResearch).

Thomas Hyde releases new CD on Guild Records

The Centre for Music Studies’ Visiting Lecturer in Composition, Thomas Hyde, has released a new CD of chamber works on Guild Records (www.guildmusic.com). The disc features seven works composed between 2003 and 2011 and features performers including the Aquinas Piano Trio, Iuventus Quartet, pianist Evelina Puzaite and cellist Katherine Jenkinson. The CD was launched at a special concert in the Performance Space at City on 17th September.