Category Archives: News

City Alumna Wins Teacher of the Year Award

I graduated from City University in 2011 and received expert vocal tuition throughout my course, this gave me excellent grounding for teaching singing myself and the confidence to lead others in vocal ensembles. Whilst at City I took a module that involved finding a placement; it was through my placement that I discovered I wanted to teach music and lead young people on their musical journeys.

I began as a Teaching Assistant at Ifield School, a special school for students aged 5-16, before embarking on my School Direct programme with the Faculty of Education in September 2013. I was fortunate enough to be awarded the title of Kent and Medway Newly Qualified Teacher of the Year 2015.

This was awarded as a result of improvements I have made to the music provision at Ifield, especially the extracurricular music activities. I have formed a full choir, which sings regularly within and beyond the school.

I constantly use material I learnt from City. The BMus programme helped me develop my passion for music and I use this to inspire and expand my pupils’ interest in music.

I enjoyed my time at City and it was the right decision to join the BMus course. The staff and the course provided me with an excellent musical basis that continues to assist me in my working life.

Hannah Boyd (BMus)

Music Department AHRC Research Funding Success

Music Department academics have secured £50,000 funding from the 10^th Anniversary AHRC Cultural Engagement Fund. The scheme funds one or more collaborative projects to support the engagement of arts and humanities research with wider cultural and civic contexts.The scheme particularly seeks to fund recently completed doctoral graduates, and so aims to to support the broader career development of these graduates, particularly in relation to work with non-academic partners to support the impact of arts and humanities research.

Professor Stephen Cottrell will work with Dr Jocelyn Howell on sources in the Boosey and Hawkes archive. The project will use 3D printer technology to provide lost or damaged component parts for older musical instruments for which such parts are no longer available.

Dr Alexander Lingas will work with Dr Dimitrios Skrekas to develop a study day on the teaching of Byzantine music in diaspora involving academic musicologists from the Department of Music at City University and its Erasmus partner, the Department of Music Studies of the University of Athens, members of the choir Cappella Romana, instructors and students of the School of Byzantine Music of the Archdiocese of Thyateira and Great Britain, and interested members of the general public.

Dr Laudan Nooshin will work with Dr Andrew Pace and the British Library on the organisation and interpretation of the Peter Kennedy Paper Archive. Peter Kennedy was one of the most important collectors of music traditions from the British Isles. He started recording in the early 1950s, work that instigated the presentation of folk music and traditions on the BBC. In just over 50 years he amassed a collection of audio and video recordings amounting to approximately 1500 hours, plus several hundred photographs as negatives and prints and cabinets full of paperwork (correspondence, contracts with artists, etc.).

Middle East and Central Asia Music Forum, 27th November 2015

On Friday 27th November 2015, the Music Department at City University hosted the Middle East and Central Asia Music Forum, a research event run in conjunction with the Music Department at SOAS and the Institute of Musical Research. The forum is convened by Laudan Nooshin and since 2007 has been a twice yearly meeting point for researchers, students and anyone interested in the music and culture of the region.

The forum was attended by about 50 people and speakers included both senior scholars – Professor Owen Wright (SOAS), Professor Rachel Beckles Willson (Royal Holloway) and Dr Ruth Davis (Cambridge) – alongside research students Tamara Turner and Louis Brehony (both King’s College London), Salvatore Morra (Royal Holloway) and Saied Kordmafi (SOAS). It’s an indication of how healthy the field is that there are now so many research students working on the musics of the Middle East and Central Asia.

Topics ranged from trance music in Algeria to the Arab Idol singing contest and new directions in Iranian classical music.

The day ended with a screening of a documentary film, ‘6 Centuries and 6 Years’ (2015, dir: Mojtaba Mirtahmasb) about a project to restore and record a repertoire of compositions attributed to the highly influential Abd al-Qadir Maraghi, a prominent composer, music theorist, author and poet of the 15th century.

http://www.city.ac.uk/events/2015/november/middle-east-and-central-asia-music-forum

Composition Alumnus on Oscars Shortlist

Recent MA Composition graduate, Nico Casal, composed the score for the short film Stutterer which has made the shortlist for this year’s Academy Awards.

The film explores the challenging experiences of a young man with a severe speech impediment. The film has already been selected for nearly thirty prestigious film festivals and took home 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 Prize at Kerry Film Festival, the Best Drama Award at Aesthetica Short Film Festival and many more.

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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PhD Alumni News from Mark Porter

Mark Porter, who completed his doctorate at City in 2014, has been awarded postdoctoral funding to pursue research at the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies in Erfurt, Germany. His project, entitled “Axes of Resonance in Christian Congregational Music”, builds on the work of Hartmut Rosa, Jean-Luc Nancy and Veit Erlmann, among others, in order to explore sonic and social concepts of resonance in relation to congregational singing. Mark is interested, in particular, in the potential for concepts of resonance to supplement ideas of authenticity, which has become an increasingly stretched analytical category in recent writing, and for research on congregational music to help to explore conceptual travelling between metaphorical and literal usages of ‘resonance’ in the literature. He is the first musicologist to be accepted at Max Weber, and whilst there he will engage in interdisciplinary dialogue with scholars from a wide range of contemporary and historical areas of social and cultural enquiry.

Since graduating, Mark has obtained a book contract with Ashgate publishing in order to publish his doctoral research in monograph format. The book, entitled “Contemporary Worship Music and Everyday Musical Lives” is due out in 2016 and will appear in Ashgate’s Congregational Music Studies series. An article focusing on Mark’s investigation of marginal musical spaces at St Aldates, Oxford, meanwhile, has also been accepted for publication in the Journal of Contemporary Religion. His previous article “The Developing Field of Christian Congregational Music Studies”, published in the journal Ecclesial Practices, has proved remarkably popular and, since publication has received over 1,500 downloads.

Mark has continued to be active in organising the biennial Christian congregational music: local and global perspectives conference at Cuddesdon, outside Oxford (http://congregationalmusic.org). The conference, which met for the third time over the summer, has now become an established institution, and has even received its own entry in the Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology. Earlier in the year Mark also received an invitation to speak at Oxford University’s Music and Theology seminar on the relationship between ethnomusicology and theology – a paper he hopes to work up for publication over the course of the next year.

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West Africa at The British Library – A Personal Experience

Peter Morrell, First Year BMus Student

On Tuesday 3^rd November 2015, the first year BMus students visited the British Library exhibition: ‘West Africa: Word, Symbol, Song.’ This was an illustrated history of how song and dance has been formed in West Africa. It also told us how the musical language generated in certain regions of West Africa has spread to and informed music in other parts of the world; it showed this across a broad historical chronology.

We were presented with a display of many different musical threads, all of them connected to West Africa. For instance, a history of ritual was told by some artefacts connected to tribal dances and religious ceremony, different types of drum and some costumes. Another thread told the varied stories of how men and women have interacted with music differently, for example with different roles in carnival dance teams; and also how gender narratives are being told by the British Library to its London-based audience of tourists, visitors and scholars. I have a recently-awakened interest in the origins of jazz and blues music. Parts of this exhibition told the story of African slaves and what interested me most was to see how, in the face of diaspora, the slaves kept their identity thanks to song. Listening to the music through headsets in the exhibition was fun!

After an hour and a half of walking around, most of the class could be discovered on cushions in the reading corner! We looked at some of the African-generated literature on the bookshelf. I was interested to rediscover the work of Chinua Achebe, distantly reminding me of an A-Level encounter with this author and with another portrait of Africa I had studied, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. Then it was time for a fascinating discussion with Janet Topp Fargion, one of the two Curators of the exhibition, who spoke to us in depth about how she had spent four years creating this exhibition. It seems a huge range of people were involved in the consultation process.

This was a really quality field trip, giving us plenty of food for thought and so inspiring for our ‘Music in Oral Cultures’ module at City.

Middle Eastern Music Workshops with Rachel Beckles Willson

On Monday October 26th and Monday November 2nd 2015, we participated in a workshop as part of the Music Traditions of the Middle East module. The workshop was led by Professor Rachel Beckles Willson from Royal Holloway College and introduced us to the modal structures of Middle Eastern art music, focusing on Arabic maqam and Turkish makam. Rachel played the ‘ud lute and students brought their own instruments including lute, violins and guitar.

We found the workshop very enjoyable; it was a fun, new experience! It was good to be able to take part in the music rather than just read about it. Rachel was very patient and she played very nicely. It was useful to hear the quartertones first-hand on an authentic instrument, as we have no experience of this in our Western training. She taught us how to improvise around different maqams and their relative structures. It was fun to engage with the rest of the class with call and response exercises and melodic development activities. We enjoyed improvising away from sheet music, which was a more authentic experience than reading from the music as we are used to. Also, it was interesting to explore our own instruments in a different way, especially if these are stringed and non-fretted. The practice of singing before playing also deepened our understanding of the melodic and rhythmic modes. Overall, we think this has given us a good understanding of the musical culture and enriched our listening ability when researching this topic further.

The following week (November 9th), the focus moved to Iranian classical music and we were fortunate to be able to experience live music again, this time from santur (hammered dulcimer) player Saeid Kord Mafi who has recently moved to the UK from Iran to study for a PhD. He played examples from the classical repertoire and answered questions about life as a musician in Iran.

Charlotte Algar, Sarah Hashim and Marisa Oikawa

Rachel Beckles WIllson playing the ‘ud

Saeid Kord Mafi Playing the Santur

Laudan Nooshin Presents WOMEX 2015 Professional Excellence Award in Budapest

Laudan Nooshin was in Budapest last week to present the 2015 WOMEX Professional Excellence Award to Iranian music producer Ramin Sadighi. Sadighi set up the Hermes record label in 1999 and has since produced some of the most innovative and boundary-breaking music in Iran. WOMEX is the annual world music industry exposition which this year was held in Budapest from 21st to 25th October and attended by over 2,500 artists, producers, promoters, journalists and others involved in the world music industry.

Laudan chaired a Q&A session with Ramin on 24th October and presented his award at the closing ceremony. Here is an extract from her speech:

“I am deeply honoured and humbled to be presenting the 2015 WOMEX Professional Excellence Award to Mr Ramin Sadighi. I believe that WOMEX has shown great foresight in giving this award to a man who – I think it is no exaggeration to say – has changed the face of music production in Iran, setting new standards, challenging stereotypes and opening new musical spaces.

As someone who has been involved with Iranian music for more than 30 years, I am grateful for this opportunity to publicly thank Ramin – and Hermes, the label that he founded 16 years ago. And, of course, this award is also intended to recognise all of those working in the independent music sector in Iran, and to pay tribute to their amazing resilience and creativity. And, given the overwhelmingly negative media representations of Iran, it’s all the more important to have such moments of recognition.

When I think of Hermes, four words come to mind: Vision. Quality. Integrity. Trust.

Hermes’ work is visionary and boundary-breaking. Above all, it has provided a space for supporting, promoting the work of, and creating an audience for music which crosses boundaries of many kinds, musical and cultural.

Hermes has set new standards of quality for music production in Iran, from the music itself, the presentation of albums, the many concerts at home and abroad – in particular bringing musicians to Iran; and numerous events such as discussion and listening sessions and film screenings. Hermes is much more than a record company – it has created a community around this music.”

http://www.hermesrecords.com/en/

Music Department 40th Birthday Boat Trip.

City University’s Music at 40 Cruise was a truly wonderful occasion. A clear, crisp October evening in London provided the perfect backdrop for a night of celebrations, laughter, music, and cake (it was a birthday celebration after all, and what birthday would be complete without cake?). Arriving at Temple pier with some of my classmates, the first two people I recognised in the line were two who not only played a big role in our first week at City to make sure we all settled in, but who continued to make a difference to us throughout our time there (albeit in very different ways).

These two familiar faces were quickly followed by a medley of people who we graduated with, those in the years above and below, the lecturers and personal tutors who made sure we survived, and a large number of completely new faces. Making our way down the line (looking for “the lady with the ipad and name stickers”), it really hit home how many people over the last 40 years had embarked on the same journey that we began just 4 years ago and it made me hope that many more will follow in our footsteps!

The night itself was smooth sailing (literally), with highlights including a speech given by the founder of the Department, Professor Malcolm Troup, which was incredibly humbling and inspirational; and the surprise of finding a gamelan set on the top deck that would be played later in the night. Most of all though, it was wonderful to see my peers and lecturers once again and to catch up with one another over a year on from graduating. That may not sound like a long time but when life gets in the way as it too often does, events like this are more important than ever to remind us to cherish the relationships that began in City University’s Music Department. Here’s to the next 40 years!

Zara Lim, BMus alumnus (graduated 2014)