Category Archives: Conferences

Laudan Nooshin presents at ‘Islam and Popular Arts’ conference

In early March 2013, Laudan Nooshin travelled to Amsterdam to take part in a conference entitled ‘Islam and Popular Arts’. The conference was funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) and convened by Karin van Nieuwkerk (Radboud University, Nijmegen) whose best known books are: A Trade like Any Other: Female Singers and Dancers in Egypt (1995) and Muslim Rap, Halal Soaps, and Revolutionary Theater: Artistic Developments in the Muslim World (2011).

The conference brought together invited scholars working on music, theatre, dance and visual arts in a range of Islamic countries, from Ghana and Morocco in the west to Indonesia in the east. A number of papers examined the impact of the political events following the 2011 ‘Arab Spring’ on performing and visual arts, and many of the speakers discussed the emergence of new forms of Islamic artistic expression over recent decades. Laudan’s paper was entitled ‘Discourses of Religiosity in Post-1998 Iranian Popular Music’, and the other UK delegate was Professor Martin Stokes from King’s College London, talking about ‘Islam, Popular Culture and Aesthetics’.

The conference was held in a beautiful converted boathouse right on the canals.

Centre Staff and Student Speak on Byzantine Music in New York

Senior Lecturer Dr Alexander Lingas, who has been spending the autumn term as a Visiting Research Fellow in Hellenic Studies at Princeton University, will be joining a distinguished group of scholars offering presentations on ancient and modern facets of Byzantine music in New York City. On Thursday, 29 November he will open a series of lectures at Queens College of the City University of New York with an introduction to the history of music in Byzantium.

On Saturday, 8 December he will present the opening paper of the ‘Mostly Orthros 2012’ conference jointly sponsored by the Axion Estin Foundation and the Sophia Institute at Union Theological Seminary. Dr Lingas will speak on ‘Byzantine Chant in the American Spiritual Marketplace’, after which City University London Ph.D. candidate Spyridon Antonopoulos will turn to the fifteenth century with a paper entitled ‘The Kalophonic Sticherarion of Manuel Chrysaphes: A Case Study in Reception History’.

For conference abstracts and additional information, please see the website of the Axion Estin Foundation.

CUNY Byzantine Chant Flyer

Dr Christopher Wiley addresses SEDA Annual Conference at Aston University, Birmingham

Dr Christopher Wiley addressed the 17th Annual Conference of the Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA), ‘Excellence in Teaching: recognising, enhancing, evaluating and achieving impact’, held at Aston Business School Conference Centre, Aston University, Birmingham on 15-16 November 2012.

His presentation, entitled ‘Standardized Module Evaluation for Teaching Excellence and Enhancement: Views of Students and Staff at a Single UK Higher Education Institution’, discussed the principles underpinning the standardization of module evaluation and its advantages and disadvantages.

Drawing on the standardized module evaluation implemented across City University London last year and some of the more localized processes it replaced, as well as the views of students and staff interviewed as part of his research, Dr Wiley also considered other measures by which teaching excellence might instead be recognized such as student-led teaching award schemes.

In the course of the workshop session, Dr Wiley facilitated a lively discussion on the relative merits and drawbacks of standardized module evaluation, exploring the processes currently implemented at different institutions, sharing best practices, and working towards action planning for the future.

Dr Christopher Wiley to join Turning Technologies’ Distinguished Educator Programme

Dr Christopher Wiley, Senior Lecturer in Music at City University London, has been appointed as a Distinguished Educator by Turning Technologies, global leader in voting, polling, and assessment systems used by schools, universities, and corporations.

In this role, Dr Wiley will be responsible for sharing with the company’s growing community of users in the UK and Europe best practice, pedagogical applications, and his own experience as a music lecturer using Turning Technologies’ response technology.

Dr Wiley, who joins the Programme as the first Distinguished Educator to be appointed from the Arts and Humanities, will sit alongside world-renowned educators such as Dr Eric Mazur, Harvard Professor and creator of the highly successful peer instruction method of teaching, as well as other HE professionals from across the world.

Commenting on his appointment, Dr Chris Wiley said, “I have been using Turning Technologies’ electronic voting systems since 2008 and was awarded a University Prize for Teaching Innovation the following year for my pioneering work in this area. I was invited to join the Distinguished Educator programme following my presentation at Turning Technologies’ User Conference at Aarhus University, Denmark in June 2012.

“As a role centred on the provision of academic expertise for a commercial enterprise, the Distinguished Educator position also embodies City University London’s unique focus on ‘academic excellence for business and the professions’.”

Read the full news release here:

http://www.prlog.org/12005628-dr-christopher-wileysenior-lecturer-in-music-at-city-university-londonto-join-turning-technologies.html

http://www.cisionwire.com/livewire-pr/r/dr-christopher-wiley–senior-lecturer-in-music-at-city-university-london–to-join-turning-technologi,c9322676

Doctoral students Sini Timonen and Alex Jeffery present at major international conference

Two of the Centre’s doctoral students presented papers at a major international conference, ‘Imagining Communities Musically: Putting Popular Music in its Place’, held by the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) last week at the University of Salford.

Sini Timonen, who is in the closing stages of her PhD on women musicians’ contribution to popular music in England between 1962 and 1971, gave a paper entitled ‘The Girl Singer in 1960s London: the Position of Female Vocalists within the Pop Music Industry’. Drawing on original interviews conducted with lesser-known ‘Brit Girls’ active on the London pop scene in the sixties, Sini explored the major challenges they faced, the strategies by which they navigated them, and the implications of the essentially male-oriented contexts in which they worked.

Alexander Jeffery presented the paper ‘Reconfiguring Prince: how online fan communities are taking back control of the album’, in which he examined traditions amongst Prince fans active in online forums of proposing their own alternative track listings for landmark albums such as Purple Rain as well as abandoned album projects. Alex, who has recently entered his second year on the doctoral programme, is conducting research on manifestations of the long-form musical work in contemporary popular culture.

Alex is supervised by Dr Christopher Wiley and Sini is co-supervised by Dr Wiley and Professor Steve Stanton.

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.

Music Analysis and the SMA: a double anniversary

Michael Spitzer opening the SMA’s ‘A Celebration of Analysis’, 21-22 September 2012

Many thanks for the warm welcome!

For my first item, I’d just like to report from a symposium I helped organize as a committee member of the Society for Music Analysis (SMA). This year, the journal Music Analysis turned thirty years old, and the SMA twenty one. In honour of this double anniversary, the SMA held a symposium titled ‘A Cerebration of Analysis’ at London’s Institute of Musical Research (IMR) in Senate House, September 21-22. It featured Julian Horton, Adam Ockelford, John Koslovsky, Elizabeth Eva Leach, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, Nicholas Marston, Danuta Mirka, Nicholas Reyland, Michael Spitzer, and Edward Venn. There was a special ‘Schenker Documents Online’ session convened by Ian Bent and William Drabkin, and Richard Cohn and Jonathan Dunsby were the Special Keynote Speakers.

Arnold Whittall addressing the SMA delegates

At the end of the first day, Arnold Whittall — the elder statesman of music analysis in the UK and one of the founders of the discipline (if we can call it that, the debate is still ongoing) — was refreshingly optimistic about the future of analysis, despite changing fashions, withering attacks on its right to exist, etc. It is my understanding that this text will be published in the next issue of Music Analysis. More extensive reviews of the symposium itself will be published in the SMA’s Newsletter (forthcoming this October I hope), which yours truly is editing. In the meantime do have a look in the SMA’s website, which includes the programme and plenty of photos (captions are still work in progress, though): http://www.sma.ac.uk/event/a-cerebration-of-analysis/

Finally, a note to all postgrads: the SMA organizes special conferences for students (see for example http://www.sma.ac.uk/event/tags-2012/) and there are also informal meetings and events organized by our student reps (please get in touch with either Suzie or Kirstie via students@sma.ac.uk; their blog is on http://sma.academia.edu/SocietyforMusicAnalysis/Blog). It’s a great way to meet students with similar interests, get conference practice and so on, and the SMA helps with travel and accommodation bursaries. The good news is that until the end of 2013 student membership is free — please have a look and do take advantage: http://www.sma.ac.uk/join/

Shay

Dr Miguel Mera addresses international conference in Andalucia, Spain

Dr Miguel Mera gave a presentation entitled ‘audiovisual composition: functional, narrative and aesthetic criteria’ (La creacion musical para el audiovisual: criterios esteticos narrativos y funcionales) at the International University of Andalucia. The event was held in the beautiful town of Baeza which is a UNESCO world heritage site and contains the best-preserved examples of Renaissance architecture in Spain.

Dr Mera’s presentation, which discussed various aspects of film composition practice, provided some insights into the dynamics between objectives, processes and final results.

Pictured (from left to right): Dr Kiko Mora (Universidad de Alicante), Professor Philip Tagg (University of Huddersfield), Dr Eduardo Viñuela Suárez (Universidad de Oviedo), Dr Miguel Mera (City University), Cande Sánchez Olmos (Universidad de Alicante), Dr Teresa Fraile Prieto (Universidad de Extremadura), Dr Joaquin López González (Universidad de Granada).

Dr Alexander Lingas Lectures on Greek Manuscripts in Oxford

On the evening of 15 August Dr Alexander Lingas offered a lecture on Greek Liturgical Manuscripts at the Ioannou Centre for Classical and Byzantine of the University of Oxford (where he is also a Fellow of its European Humanities Research Centre). Offered for the students and faculty of Oxford’s annual Greek Palaeography Summer School, this talk surveyed the contents and use of manuscripts relating to worship in Byzantium. Dr Lingas emphasised that Byzantine liturgical manuscripts first and foremost reflected the needs of their users: priests, readers, soloists, choristers, and so on. In response to a request from the Summer School’s director, he ended his presentation by singing an Alleluia from a 13th-century chant manuscript.

Dr Christopher Wiley addresses International Conference on Learning, Institute of Education, London

Dr Christopher Wiley presented his paper ‘Divided by a Common Language? Evaluating Students’ Understanding of the Vocabulary of Assessment and Feedback at a Single UK Higher Education Institution’ at the Nineteenth International Conference on Learning, Institute of Education, University of London on 16 August 2012.

Dr Wiley’s paper, which discussed the changing context of Higher Education in the UK and its implications for assessment and feedback, fell on the same day that students across the country received their A-level results and found out whether they had been accepted to their chosen university degree course.

Presenting some of the findings of interviews conducted with students across City University London in the past academic year, Dr Wiley questioned many aspects of current assessment and feedback processes, enriching his talk with reference to innovations implemented this year in his own academic practice.

The Nineteenth International Conference on Learning welcomed some 600 delegates from 40 different countries across three days. The complete programme may be viewed here.