Category Archives: External events

City Students at the 3rd Westminster-Goldsmiths Symposium for Student Research in Popular Music

By Rachel Cunniffe, MA Music Student

On Friday 20th May, fellow MA student Michael Alloway and I attended the 3rd Westminster-Goldsmiths Symposium for Student Research in Popular Music. Located at the University of Westminster’s Marylebone Campus, the event was hosted by Chris Kennett (Westminster) and Tom Perchard (Goldsmiths, University of London). The day comprised a series of presentations from both Masters and PhD students, including City University’s Steve Wilford, and also featured a fascinating talk by Anthony Farsides, Senior Lecturer at the University of Westminster. It was extremely interesting to hear a selection of forthcoming research in the field of popular music studies.

The opening session focused on ‘Industry and Mediation’ and included presentations on the mediation between managers and emerging popular musicians (Olivia Gable, Open University), the relationship between the two record labels, Mute and Some Bizarre (Leon Clowes, Goldsmiths) and a history of the ‘Golden Age’ of the Columbian recording industry (Lucas Mateo Guingue Valencia, Westminster). The first session was concluded by Anthony Farsides, who presented his research on pop stars and brand patronage. Using recent figures as evidence, he noted the ways in which the contemporary music industry is heavily reliant on global stars such as Adele and Ed Sheeran, and discussed the increasing use of non-music brands such as Burberry for the advertisement and exposure of new artists.

The second morning session was entitled ‘Politics and Performance’ and featured an exploration of PJ Harvey’s Revolving Wheel as ‘political assemblage’ (Jacob Downs, Oxford), followed by a discussion of masculine identity in hip-hop, which focused on the work of Kanye West (Carl Emery, Keele).

After lunch, papers were given on the social motivations behind the purchase and collection of Vinyl (Pete Gofton, Goldsmiths), music and meaning in the Algerian community in London (Steve Wilford, City University London), the influence of Louis Armstrong on Django Reinhardt (Jeremiah Spillane, Goldsmiths) and finally, a proposal of an ‘environment-based connective model’ which will bridge the music industry and academia (Max Cervellino, Westminster).

Steve Wilford presenting his paper

Steve Wilford presenting his paper

The final session focused on gender. Here Katrina Fuschillo (UEA) outlined the early stages of her research on contemporary listening practices and musical tastes of ‘working-class women and teenage girls’, and this was followed by a discussion of the representation of women in Bob Dylan’s Tarantula (Sara Martinez, Lancaster).

Many thought-provoking ideas were raised throughout an enjoyable and interesting day.

AHRC Cultural Engagement researcher Andrew Pace talks about his work with a collection of British and Irish folk music

Since January – as an Arts and Humanities Research Council Cultural Engagement Fellow – I’ve been cataloguing a collection of paper files at the British Library that belonged to Peter Kennedy (1922–2006), a renowned collector of British and Irish traditional music and customs. His archive spans roughly 1600 open reel tapes (around half of which are his own field recordings), 1500 photographs and 170 boxes of correspondence and song texts – a vast collection!

Whilst trawling through Peter’s papers, I discovered a number of reports he had written in the 1950s that detail his daily activities when he was travelling the UK and Ireland recording hundreds of traditional performers, including Harry Cox, Margaret Barry, Fred Jordan and the McPeake family. I realised that these detailed reports would provide an ideal focal point for a website which would collate and contextualise all of the material from his collection that I have helped the British Library to digitise over the past few years:

www.peterkennedyarchive.org

Here, Peter’s reports can be scrolled through as interactive images, where clicking on a performer’s name reveals related sound recordings and photographs from his collection. Links to currently undigitised recordings in the Library’s catalogue are also present. This simple interface holds a large amount of information, but presents it in a way that encourages its discovery rather than relying on users navigating it by text searches.

Encouraging users to explore the collection in this way also draws attention to Peter Kennedy as a collector – a narrative that is easily lost in the impersonality of library catalogue systems, but is one which lies at the heart of this collection. As an ethnomusicologist, I find these kind of insights into Peter’s fieldwork methodologies fascinating.

However, interest in Peter’s work is not limited to academics, but extends to practicing musicians, too. It’s hoped that this site will stimulate musicians and researchers to continue to engage with his work and to explore the large amount of material that hasn’t yet made it onto my website.

Peter Kennedy Records Edgar Allington in Weeting, Suffolk, 1955

Peter Kennedy Records Edgar Allington in Weeting, Suffolk, 1955

Andrew Pace completed his BMus and MA at City University London and has recently completed a PhD in Ethnomusicology at the University of Manchester.

City Staff and Students Feature Prominently at the British Forum for Ethnomusicology Annual Conference

Posted by Sam MacKay, Music PhD Student

Current and former City lecturers and students featured strongly in the recent annual conference of the British Forum for Ethnomusicology, held 14-17 April at the University of Kent. The 4 day event is the pre-eminent meeting for ethnomusicologists based in the UK and is among the most significant events in the field globally. This year’s conference took place at the Historic Dockyards in Chatham and brought together over 100 international scholars under the theme of “New Currents in Ethnomusicology”.

Presentations from City-based researchers included Dr Laudan Nooshin (Reader in Ethnomusicology) on music and cyberspace in Iran and Sam Mackay (PhD student) on music and the symbolic economy in Marseille. Dr Nooshin was also awarded the prestigious BFE Book Prize for her recent monograph Iranian Classical Music. The Discourses and Practice of Creativity.

In another success for the City research community, PhD student Stephen Wilford was elected as the BFE’s new Conference Liaison Co-officer. The role includes organising the BFE’s conferences, study days and other events and contributing proactively to the organisation’s strategies and initiatives.

The conference also featured presentations from numerous former City students including Barley Norton (current BFE Chair), Hwee San Tan, Andy Pace and Richard Lightman.

City Alumnus Andy Pace Presenting

City Alumnus Andy Pace Presenting

 

Current Music PhD Student, Sam MacKay

Current Music PhD Student, Sam MacKay

 

Laudan Nooshin Receiving her Award

Laudan Nooshin Receiving her Award

Nico Casal part of Academy Award winning team

Nico Casal — a graduate of the MA Programme in Composition — is celebrating after a win at the Oscars.

Nico composed the music for Stutterer, which was named Best Short Film at the 2016 Academy Awards in Hollywood.

Stutterer explores the challenging experiences of a young man with a severe speech impediment. The Academy Award is one of several awards the film has already won, including: the Best Foreign Film prize from the Los Angeles International Short Film Festival; the Special Jury Award at Savannah Film Festival; Best International Short Film at Kerry Film Festival; and the Best Drama award at Aesthetica Short Film Festival.Stutterer1

City Students and Alumni present at BFE/RMA Research Students’ Conference 2016: ‘Disciplines in Dialogue’

The 49th Annual Music Research Students’ Conference took place in Prifysgol, Bangor University (Wales), from 6th to 8th January 2016. Usually organised by the Royal Music Association, it was for the first time this year co-organised with the British Forum for Ethnomusicology. It gathered music students from all over the UK and from overseas.

The theme of the conference was ‘Disciplines in Dialogue: a multidisciplinary conference for students involved in all kinds of music research’ and papers explored the boundaries between musicologies of various kinds.

City University MA alumna Solène Heinzl and PhD student and Visiting Lecturer Stephen Wilford attended the conference on the 7th and 8th January respectively. Solène presented a paper on ‘The Impact of Technological Communication on Filmmaker-Composer Creative Collaboration’ and Stephen Wilford spoke about the potential of the Internet as a site for ethnomusicological fieldwork as part of the ‘Fieldwork Methods’ session.

The 7th January included two very informative careers and methodologies sessions: the first on ‘How to Get Published’, sponsored by the publisher Routledge; the second on ‘Post-PhD Careers Beyond Academia’. There was also an opportunity for students to express their needs and concerns during the ‘Open Discussion of Graduate Training Needs’. The day ended with a keynote presentation by Professor Keith Howard (SOAS, University of London) entitled ‘The Future of Our Musical Pasts’. Professor Howard considered convergences and divergences between ethnomusicology and musicology and asked whether these discussions were relevant today, stressing the importance of preserving and sustaining the future of our musical pasts.

The second day of the conference included a number of panels with students presenting papers on a range of topics. These included another City BMus and MA alumnus, Andrew Pace, whose presentation focused on the role of the guitar in Maltese ghana music. Andrew traced the historical development of acoustic guitars in the local Maltese music scene, examining both the evolving design of the instruments and their role in affording status to the musicians playing them. The day also included panels on ‘Current Issues in Music in Higher Education’ (convened by the National Association for Music in Higher Education) and ‘Fieldwork Methods’ (convened by the BFE). The conference concluded with a keynote presentation (in the form of the Jerome Roche Lecture) from Professor Nanette Nielson (University of Oslo). Professor Nielson’s paper examined issues of subjectivity in relation to the role of music in film, and discussed the ways in which music is able to shape the merging subjectivities of characters and spectators.

The conference was a great success, bringing together postgraduate students and scholars with a range of musical interests. The connections formed between RMA, BFE and NAMHE members and the productive discussions that these generated, should be applauded, and hopefully augur well for the future of such joint conferences.

Solene Heinzl and Stephen Wilford

 

Professor Keith Howard’s Keynote Presentation

Ruth Glasspool (Managing Editor, Visual Arts, Music and Theatre & Performance Journals, Routledge, Left) and Professor Laura Tunbridge (Editor, Journal of the Royal Music Association, Right) - session on 'How to Get Published'

Ruth Glasspool (Managing Editor, Visual Arts, Music and Theatre & Performance Journals, Routledge, Left) and Professor Laura Tunbridge (Editor, Journal of the Royal Music Association, Right) – session on ‘How to Get Published’

Andrew Lambert awarded Silver Prize by the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists

andyInterdisciplinary PhD student Andrew Lambert has been honoured by the Worshipful Company of Information Technologists (WCIT) for his outstanding contribution to the field of computer science.

The Information Technologists Company makes information and communication technology (ICT) accessible and usable to everyone; campaigns for the removal of barriers to accessible IT for all; and encourages greater professionalism in the design, assessment and support of accessible ICT.

Andrew, whose PhD (supervised by Dr Tillman Weyde and Dr Newton Armstrong) focuses on oscillating networks for music generation, is the holder of an MSc in Creative Systems from the University of Sussex and a BA (Hons) in European Theatre Arts from Rose Bruford College.

Conference Report: ‘Music, Composition and Interdisciplinarity: States of Play’

On Thursday 28th January 2016 my fellow MA student Michael Alloway and I attended the ‘Music, Composition and Interdisciplinarity: States of Play’ conference which was held at Oxford Brookes University. Hosted by Dr Tom Armstrong (University of Surrey) and Professor Paul Whitty (Oxford Brookes University), the event was both engaging and thought-provoking and will no doubt prepare us well to embark upon the Interdisciplinarity and Collaborative Process MA module of this term.

Following a welcome talk, the first panel session focused on leading and facilitating interdisciplinarity, and featured composer Peter Wiegold (Brunel University), Professor Rebecca Hoyle (University of Southampton) and Professor Paul Whitty. Ideas raised in this session included the tensions which may arise in interdisciplinary work and collaboration, the complex issues surrounding the rigidity of ‘the discipline’ as a concept, and whether in fact this rigidity is diminishing as interdisciplinary work becomes increasingly common. Dr Armstrong, the chair of the panel, suggested that interdisciplinarity is in fact a more natural approach to scholarly work than disciplinarity, resounding with initial anxieties expressed in the 19th Century by Friedrich Nietzsche, as the disciplines first began to take hold. Professor Hoyle, a mathematician whose current project focuses on striving to answer various research questions using interdisciplinary means, echoed this view. She claimed the lines which separate disciplines are unimportant, and to successfully answer a research question one must draw from whichever discipline is necessary.

Delegates were then invited to take part in a vocal theatre workshop led by composer Helen Chadwick. In a thoroughly enjoyable hour, we were taught snippets from some of Helen’s song theatre pieces and learnt about her work as director of the Helen Chadwick Song Theatre. After lunch, the second panel took to the floor which featured Susanna Eastburn (Chief Executive Sound and Music) and our own visiting lecturer, composer and artist Claudia Molitor. Similar ideas were expressed here which indicated the move towards interdisciplinarity as a normative process in the arts. Claudia noted how often an idea may naturally demand interdisciplinary processes without necessarily having set out as an interdisciplinary project, and pointed out that the distinctions between interdisciplinarity and collaboration must be considered. The keynote speech was given by Professor Cathy Lane (University of the Arts London, Director of CRISAP) who presented her recent work in sound art. Professor Lane’s research interests include how sound can relate to the past and memories, which is reflected in her work using the spoken word, while her practice has also been largely shaped by the women’s movement. Professor Lane was awarded her PhD in electroacoustic composition from City University.

The conference concluded with a plenary discussion, which both Michael and I agree to have provided much food for thought. We are grateful to Claudia for inviting us along and are excited to be part of the ‘interdisciplinarity’ network, though admittedly a highlight of the day was to discover that we are in fact not alone in our constant struggle to pronounce the key word.

Rachel Cunniffe, MA Music Student

The Middle East in London Magazine Features City Staff and Student

The Middle East in London magazine is published five times a year by the London Middle East Institute at the School or Oriental and African Studies. The February/March 2016 issue is a special issue on Iranian music and features articles by City lecturer Dr Laudan Nooshin and PhD student Roya Arab, as well as a review of Laudan’s 2015 book Iranian Classical Music: The Discourses and Practice of Creativity (Ashgate Press) by Stefan Williamson Fa.

Laudan’s article ‘Sounding the City: Tehran’s Contemporary Soundscapes’ is based on her recent field trip to Iran in August/ September 2015 and explores the relationship between sound and the urban environment as a means of understanding individuals’ engagement with the sensory sound-worlds that they inhabit. Roya’s article – ‘Swaying to Persian and Middle Eastern Tunes in London’ – offers a snapshot of Iranian and Middle Eastern music in London.

Pdfs of the two articles and book review are available below.

https://www.soas.ac.uk/lmei/meil/

Nooshin, MEIL article Jan 2016

Roya Arab Middle East in London Magazine Article (Jan 2016)

Review of Laudan Nooshin, Iranian Classical Music, MEIL Jan 2016

City Speakers at Hidden Musicians Revisited Conference

In 1989 Ruth Finnegan – an anthropologist based at the Open University – published a book called ‘The Hidden Musicians: Music-Making in an English Town’. Based on several years of ethnographic research in the ‘new town’ of Milton Keynes, the book uncovered a wealth of amateur music-making in a town which had become widely dubbed as a ‘cultural desert’. ‘The Hidden Musicians’ became a landmark publication in the study of music and culture.

On 11th and 12th January 2016, ‘The Hidden Musicians Revisited’ conference was held at the Open University in Milton Keynes. It was organised by City University music alumna Catherine Tackley (now teaching at the OU) and was attended by about 50 people from across the UK and abroad. Keynote papers were presented by Ruth Finnegan herself and Professor Derek Scott (University of Leeds).

City lecturer Laudan Nooshin and completing PhD student and Visiting Lecturer Stephen WIlford both presented papers at the conference, as follows: ‘Hide and Seek: The Internet as an Alternative Public Space for Iran’s ‘Hidden’ Musicians’ and ‘Hidden Musicians in Public Spaces: Algerian Musics and Festivals in Contemporary London’.

This was a fascinating conference in which papers addressed many different aspects of ‘hidden-ness’ in relation to music and musicians.

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City Middle Eastern Music Ensemble at the Youth Proms

On Monday 23rd November, City’s Middle Eastern Music Ensemble performed at the Royal Albert Hall as part of the Music for Youth Proms, joining the Cornwall Youth Orchestra, 47 junior violinists from Cornwall and Northamptonshire and four narrators. They performed ‘Prince Zal and the Simorgh’, a piece for orchestra and Iranian instruments composed by David Bruce in 2012 and commissioned by City University London and the London Philharmonic Orchestra as part a larger outreach project introducing young people to Iranian music and culture. The project grew out of Laudan Nooshin‘s ethnomusicological research into Iranian music, which has facilitated access to and understanding of the country’s art and culture in Britain and around the world.

Laudan explained that the piece is based on a story from the Iranian epic poem The Shahnameh (‘Book of Kings’) written about 1,000 years ago by Abolqasem Ferdowsi (940-1020). The story tells 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. She said: “With its many topical themes of tolerance and forgiveness, this story proved a wonderfully rich source for use with British youth. In particular, the piece offers a more positive image and understanding of Iran – its people, culture and history – to the young people performing and hearing it than they might normally experience through the media and other kinds of representation.”

A chance discussion led to Prince Zal being chosen by Cornwall Youth Orchestra for a performance at the National Festival of Music for Youth in Birmingham in July 2015, following which the piece was selected for the Youth Proms at the Royal Albert Hall. The orchestra was joined by members of City University’s Middle Eastern Music Ensemble who played various Iranian percussion instruments and with first year BMus student Antonios Rousounelos as soloist. The concert was a great experience for the City students.

Music for Youth is a national music education charity providing free access to performance and audience opportunities for young musicians across the UK. The charity’s proms saw 3,000 of the country’s brightest young musicians take to the stage over three nights at the Royal Albert Hall, between 23rd and 25th November, 2015.

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