This August, City University Alumnus (BMus) Henry Balme will commence his PhD in Music History at Yale University. After a rigorous application process, which included an examination and an interview, Henry was invited to join the Music Department as a doctoral student on a full scholarship at the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences.

At City University Henry engaged in a variety of musical and academic activities including sound recording & studio techniques, studio composition, piano and ensemble performance and a wide array of ethnographic, theoretical, analytical and historical music courses. He was also active outside of the Music Department, entering the CitySpark’s ‘Big Ideas’ entrepreneurship competition where he won a prize for Orfeo, a media player concept dedicated solely to improving the digital listening experience of classical music.

After completing his BMus at City in 2014 with first class honours, he went on to commence his Master’s Degree at the University of Oxford. There, Henry’s research has been interdisciplinary in scope: his Master’s Thesis, supervised by Laura Tunbridge, drew on art historical and musicological research methods to shed new light on the almanac Der Blaue Reiter (1912), an art manifesto that includes facsimiles of music by the Second Viennese School.

In the summer of 2016, he further developed his interdisciplinary research methods during an internship at the Max-Planck-Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt am Main. The research centre, officially inaugurated in the Autumn of 2015, conducts studies at the intersection of the humanities and the natural sciences, in an attempt to gain a deeper understanding of the mechanisms that impact on aesthetic liking and preferences. He helped conduct studies in the laboratories of the institute for doctoral students and the Music Department’s director, Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann and co-organised the workshop on “Methods in Empirical Music Research”, led by David Huron (Ohio State University). He designed musical stimuli for an fMRI study on neural substrates of musical expectancy and emotions by neuropsycholigist Diana Omigie.

At Yale, Henry plans to pick up threads from his studies at City, notably from Ian Pace’s course on Nineteenth Century Opera and Alexander Lingas’ module on Wagner, Mahler and Schoenberg’s ideational connections. Henry’s research will continue to be interdisciplinary in scope and focus on opera studies, especially that of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with an emphasis on Wagner and the Second Viennese School.

We wish Henry all the best for his future academic ambitions. The Matriculation Ceremony takes place on Thursday, 25 August 2016.

Former MA Composing for Moving Image student, Nico Casal, has been nominated for a Music and Sound Award (2015). Nico’s music for the HSBC Advance ‘Pink Ladies’ advertisement was nominated in the Best Composition for Broadcast Advertising category. See Nico’s work below:

The Department of Music at City is  carrying out world-class research according to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014. 87% of research produced  was judged to be ‘world-leading’ or  ‘internationally excellent’ placing City in the top ten Music departments in the United Kingdom. Further, the impact of 100% of the research in Music undertaken at City was deemed to be ‘outstanding’ or ‘very considerable’ in terms of its reach and significance. The research environment was also found to be conducive to producing research of world-leading or internationally excellent quality, in terms of its vitality and sustainability.

The results for Music, Dance, Drama and Performing Arts can be found here.

As part of the documentary series, Sound of Song, which will explore the history and development of popular music recording, the BBC has been filming in the Music Department at City University London. Sequences demonstrating historical recording practices, contemporary digital processes, and demonstrations on the Steinway grand piano of  works by Irving Berlin, Phil Spector, Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra and Lieber and Stoller were filmed in the Department’s Performance Space and Recording Studio.

Dr Miguel Mera, Deputy Head of Music, commented: “We have always had strong external links with the music industries, but it is especially pleasing to be working on this project with the BBC, not least because the writer and presenter, Neil Brand, has performed in our concert series and has given guest lectures to our students. Also, this documentary ​focuses on the close interaction between music and technology which has been a core concern of the Music Department at City since its inception.”

Neil Brand commented: “We’ve had a great time filming here in these wonderful facilities, we have had absolutely everything we needed in one very convenient space, and the result is better than I could have hoped.”

Series Producer Alastair Williams also highlighted how the City Performance Space was ideal for the BBC’s needs: “It gave us an opportunity to re-enact and produce our own musical moments from the history of recorded music.  So we recreated the Edison Tone Test and gathered a band together to record acoustically as they did in 1906 on wax cylinders.  And in the recording studio we made our own version of the song  ‘Believe’ by Cher to illustrate how Pro-Tools and Auto-Tune can change the Sound of Song.  These were fascinating and productive days exploring a century of recorded sound.”

The three-part series will be broadcast on BBC 4 in January 2015.