Laudan Nooshin has just returned from a three week fieldtrip to Iran where she was undertaking work related to current research on Iranian popular music and future projects on music in Iranian cinema and the sounds of Tehran. The latter involved recording ambient sounds across the city, including in the main Tehran bazaar, local mosques, the Tehran metro and local parks. As well as meeting and interviewing musicians, producers and others involved in Tehran’s vibrant music scene, Laudan attended rehearsals and concerts as well as several film screenings and an underground theatre performance. Below are some photos from the trip.
Buskers in Gheytarieh Park, Tehran
Dang Show Concert, Milad Tower
View of mountains on The Chaloos Road between Tehran and the Caspian Sea
Having a break on the journey from Tehran to the Caspian Sea
Shrine in North Tehran
View over Tehran from the mountains above the city
The latest recording by City Reader in Music Alexander Lingas and his US-based ensemble Cappella Romana has been named an Editor’s Choice in the August issue of Gramophone, which features a rave review of the disc by Malcolm Riley:
This important and exciting release from the Portland, Oregon-based 26-strong chamber choir is a notable successor to their ‘Good Friday in Jerusalem’ disc (5/15). Under their inspiring director Alexander Lingas they turn their attention to a recently rediscovered choral gem, the 47-minute long Passion Week by the Lithuanian-born composer Maximilian Steinberg (1883-1946).
… The a cappella textures spread variously and luxuriantly into 12 parts, requiring, as might be expected, the sopranos to soar with jewel-like brilliance and the basses to delve to their reedy subterranean depths. Cappella Romana cope with all of this with an eloquent brilliance, singing with tremendous relish, as though this obscure masterpiece had been in their repertory for years. Their unanimity of attack and fastidious approach to dynamic contrasts are just two hallmarks of an outstanding achievement. Hats off, too, to Preston Smith and Steve Barnett for their superb engineering and production. …the finest advocacy from these fine musicians. This is definitely a disc to savour.
On Friday 22nd May 2015, the Music Department hosted the Middle East and Central Asia Music Forum. This forum has been running twice a year since 2007 under the auspices of the Institute of Musical Research, but has recently moved its base to City. The Forum provides a meeting point for students, researchers and others interested in the musics and culture of the Middle East and Central Asia.
The day was a great success with about 70 people in attendance and a lively atmosphere with plenty of positive feedback and stimulating discussion after papers and in between in lunch and coffee breaks. There were 10 speakers altogether, including both research students and academics from across the UK and abroad. Highlights of the day included presentations by two City PhD students, Steve Wilford and Sam Mackay, whose papers were entitled: ‘Between Thames and Sahara: Representations of Algerian Music in Contemporary London’ and ‘A Shared History? North African Musical Heritage and the Public Sphere in Contemporary Marseille’. Other papers covered such diverse topics as female musicians in Afghanistan and Kuwaiti ṣaut music.
The main conference was followed by a book launch for Laudan Nooshin’s recently published Iranian Classical Music: The Discourses and Practice of Creativity (2015, Ashgate Press) and an evening concert which opened the City Summer Sounds Music Festival: ‘Sounds of the Bosphorous Today’ with sisters Neva and Yelda Özgen from Istanbul playing traditional and contemporary pieces on kemençe (bowed fiddle) and ‘cello.
On 10th June 2015, Laudan Nooshin presented an invited keynote paper at a conference in Norway organised by the Grieg Research School in Interdisciplinary Music Studies and held on the beautiful island of Stord. The conference was hosted jointly with the Norwegian Research School in Teacher Education and the theme was ‘The Art and Science of Improvisation’. Laudan’s keynote, which was entitled ‘Re-Imagining Musical Difference: Creative Process, Alterity and “Improvisation” in Iranian Music from Classical to Jazz’, explored the ways in which the concept of ‘improvisation’ has come to be understood, constructed and imagined by musicians in Iran over the past half century or so.
There were about 150 delegates at the conference, including a number of PhD music students from the UK. Other keynote speakers included Colin Lee, Professor of Music Therapy at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada, who completed his PhD in Music Therapy at City University London in 1992.
The Grieg Research School is a collaboration between the University of Bergen, Bergen University College, Stord/Haugesund University College, Volda University College and the University of Stavanger. It hosts two conferences each year which bring together PhD students in a range of music disciplines, including music education, ethnomusicology, music therapy, musicology, performance and composition. Students have an opportunity to get feedback on their work and each conference includes a number of invited keynote speakers.
Dr Miguel Mera’s audiovisual dance composition, Morriña, will be presented at the Venice Experimental Cinema and Performance Art Festival at the Palazzo Ca’ Zanardi from the 17th to the 27th of June 2015. It will be the first in a cycle of three events in June, July and August 2015.
The festival is focused on therelationship between body and space, and the hybridization of identities within different cultural, physical, social, and urban settings. Morriña explores relationships between music and bodily movement, examines how communities hold onto perceptions of particular identities, and considers how memory and nostalgia are distorted over time.
This month’s issue of Songlines magazine (#108) featured one of our Masters student’s guide to the world’s best festivals. Following a successful internship for Songlines in 2013, Alex de Lacey has been regularly contributing reviews and columns to the publication, but this is his first full feature to be published. It builds upon our strong relationship with the highly regarded world music magazine, with many of our students completing internships with them as part of our Professional Placement programmes offered at both undergraduate and postgraduate level.
Alexander Lingas led the vocal ensemble Cappella Romana recently performed medieval Byzantine chant to large and enthusiastic audiences in the Southeast and Northwest regions of the USA. Recent City graduate Spyridon Antonopoulos was a soloist in all these performances.
They performed “Good Friday in Jerusalem,” a programme that the ensemble had previously recorded at Stanford Memorial Church and was released on February 10th of this year, immediately reaching #1 on Amazon’s Vocal and Opera charts and opening at #8 on the Billboard Classical charts.
“Good Friday in Jerusalem,” features Medieval Byzantine Chant from the Typikon of the Anastasis (the Church of the Holy Sepulchre), including works by Kosmas the Melodist (8th century), Romanos the Melodist (6th century), Theophanes Protothronos (9th century), and Leo VI the Wise (866–912).
On Sunday morning the ensemble chanted morning services for over three hours (Matins, a hierarchical Divine Liturgy celebrated by His Eminence Metropolitan Alexios, and an Ordination to the Priesthood) at Annunciation Cathedral.
A few weeks before the ensemble had presented three performances of the same programme on the opposite coast of the USA in Portland, Oregon and Seattle Washington:
James McQuillen of Oregon Artswatch wrote the following about the Portland performances:
“On a strictly sonic level, the concert at Portland’s Trinity Episcopal Cathedral was magnificent … As with last year’s concerts of Finnish Orthodox music, it was especially satisfying to hear the singers perform music they’d already worked to a fine polish for committing to disc. The ten men filled the space with dark resonance, making effortless work of melismatic unison melodies and rock-solid drones, and the pacing was measured but unflagging. … The concert also invited a listener to delve into the expressive potential of this ancient music, a kind of artistic expression that, because the rigors and self-negating ethos of the medieval church are worlds away from the nakedly personal poetry of, say, Schubert, we have little ability to grasp. But it was impossible not to hear the laments of Mary at the foot of the cross and not be moved. … Good Friday in Jerusalem went deep, and it sounded close to the spring from which poured centuries of sacred music.”
A few weeks before the release of the world premiere recording of Maximilian Steinberg’s Passion Week directed by Alexander Lingas, Benedict Sheehan of the Orthodox Arts Journal gave this new disc from Cappella Romana a rave review:
“Every so often a record comes along that changes the landscape of choral music.…The work itself is the sort of thing musicologists dream about: a treasure of inestimable musical value, hidden away in some attic or dusty library stack, unknown for nearly a century. Similar to conductor Johann von Herbeck happening upon Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony nearly forty years after the composer’s death, the discovery of Steinberg’s Passion Week is cause for celebration among lovers of music. It is a profoundly moving piece of sacred choral literature, and a masterwork of compositional craft. … While the discovery of this long-lost major work of sacred choral music is a milestone in the history of the literature, in no lesser degree is Cappella Romana’s rendering of the piece a landmark contribution to the modern canon of choral recordings. In every respect, and I don’t use these words lightly, their new disc is a triumph. Using their characteristic radiantly bright and clear sound—a welcome relief from the proliferation of performances that seem to be stuck in the wrong-headed notion that Russian sacred music has to be dark, dramatic, and ponderous, with a superabundance of vocal “cover”—Alexander Lingas and the singers of Cappella Romana bring a highly refined musical sensibility to the Steinberg score. Every vocal line is luminously present to the ear, every musical idea carefully considered and totally convincing. The solos in the piece too emerge seamlessly from the ensemble like subtly brighter beams of light, commanding but never dominating or seizing attention too boldly. Of particular note are the brief but captivating solos of baritone (and executive director of the ensemble) Mark Powell and soprano Catherine van der Salm. … Such a beautiful work deserves the attention of the world. However, if it is going to capture the world’s attention it needs a vehicle, and I will be surprised if anyone can offer a better one than Cappella Romana’s new record anytime soon. Indeed, though it’s only March, I will be surprised if a better choral recording of anything comes out this year.” —Benedict Sheehan, Orthodox Arts Journal
On Saturday April 18th, on BBC Radio 3’s programme ‘Hear and Now’, a feature in the series ‘Modern Muses’ was broadcast documenting the long-term collaboration between pianist Ian Pace, Lecturer in Music and Head of Performance at City, and composer Michael Finnissy. This can be downloaded as a podcast here.
Also just published is a new article by Ian Pace for The Conversation, entitled ‘Between Worlds: the danger of transforming 9/11 into stylised art’, considering the new opera by Tansy Davies and wider questions of opera and realism, and the transformation of traumatic events into aesthetic spectacle. Any comments from interested parties (including those studying opera or music theatre at City) would be welcomed, either here or under the article itself.
Alexander Lingas led the vocal ensemble C
