Visitors to City, University of London have joined staff and students to create a new audio-visual art installation in the Department of Music.

Over a period of several months, participants recorded sounds from around the department’s rehearsal, teaching, studio and performance spaces. They also designed and painted artwork on walls of the foyer at the Performance Space.

Speakers have been installed in the area and the 30-minute composition of audio recordings is being played periodically into the room. The finished audio-visual artwork reflects the history, current profile and possible futures of the department, taking inspiration from the architecture of the building and activity happening within it.

Walls On Walls

The work was facilitated by Walls On Walls, a collaboration between Dr Tullis Rennie, who is a composer and City music lecturer, and artist Laurie Nouchka.

Dr Rennie said: “The idea of this project was that anybody in the City community was able to participate – we asked people to pick up paint brushes, explore the area to make recordings and help edit the audio.

“It’s a unique installation because a lot of participative art projects are visual but don’t involve sound. With this work, the group wanted to open up some of the hidden spaces in the department and record sounds that most people are not privy to.”

Practice-based research

The installation is part of Dr Rennie’s practice-based research into collaborative arts process. Practice-based research is a type of study where the aim is to develop knowledge through creative activity.

Dr Rennie’s objective was to observe participation in the creation of an audio-visual community project and see how this translated into the final artwork.

He said: “Participants were taken on a tour and recorded sound from lots of different areas, including the corridors, empty concert rooms, the spaces between rehearsal room and behind doors that are normally closed.”

Dr Rennie added: “They also had electro-magnetic equipment that they could use to record sounds from the wires around the department that connect various studio spaces.

“Students were able to access and edit the recordings themselves and we held an open listening group where everybody could voice opinions.”

The artwork is now a permanent installation in the Department of Music. It was launched at an open public event on Wednesday 30^th May 2018.

Dr Rennie recently received a commendation for his work with Walls On Walls in the Outstanding Contribution to the Local Community category of the university’s President’s Awards.

 

On Tuesday 29th May, the Department of Music welcomed Michael Nyman CBE, one of Britain’s most celebrated composers, to deliver its first Distinguished Lecture in Music.

In the talk – which was free and open to the public – Nyman discussed his diverse career and musical influences and borrowings. He focused in particular on his allusions to previous music which he has only seen on the page, never heard.

A champion of new music

City’s Head of Performance Ian Pace, who chaired the talk, said: “It was a great privilege to be able to welcome Michael Nyman for this talk.

“Many will know of his scores for films like The Draughtsman’s Contract, The Piano or Wonderland, but he is equally a composer of a great many autonomous and sometimes abstract works, including symphonies, string quartets, song cycles, and so on. Nyman was also a musicologist – and an ethnomusicologist – at the beginning of his career, working on early baroque music and collecting Romanian folk song.”

Ian Pace added: “Furthermore, he championed new music as a critic for The Listener, while his 1974 book Experimental Music: Cage and Beyond, was profoundly influential for many.

“For all of these reasons, his diverse work is especially relevant to a department like ours. Nyman’s work, drawing upon pre-existing musics, is far from simply nostalgic or idly eclectic, but represents a very clearly defined and individual sensibility.”

The lecture was part of the Department’s annual three-week festival of music, City Summer Sounds, featuring free events by our students alongside acclaimed international professionals.

 

The Music Department celebrated the end of the Autumn Term in style with the annual Christmas Cabaret on the afternoon of 15th December.

Starting with the much-loved students vs staff quiz – which the students won, of course! – the afternoon featured appearances by the gamelan, led by Andy Channing, and the jazz-improvisation ensemble, led by Shirley Smart, the staff biscuit tin ensemble performed the world premiere of a specially-commissioned piece by MA student Gilberto Filho, for 5 biscuit tins played with a selection of vegetables, and we were treated to some vocal delights including a Disney medley and the traditional 12 Days of City Christmas.

We also had a beautiful specially-baked cake made by 3rd year students Harriet McBurnie and Eunji Choi. And we raised £50 for Mind and the Islington Law Centre by raffling and auctioning the beautiful handmade cabaret posters (to add to the £170 already raised in Trafalgar Square on 13th December).

The afternoon ended with a set by the funk band, when the performance space turned into a dance floor. Thanks to the Cabaret Committee and to everyone for contributing to such a fun afternoon. Happy Christmas all and see you next term!

     

      

      

 

In late September we launched our new research centre SPARC, Sound Practice And Research @ City, with the Touching Sound symposium, the first of our yearly September Symposiums.

We spent two days contemplating the tactility of sound with a group of people fr om a variety of disciplines. Surgeon Prof Roger Kneebone, our key-note, opened proceedings with his talk on touch in medicine where he introduced us to the fascinating world of surgery and his collaboration with a lace-maker. He explained that for him, attending to touch, is a way of looking at the practice of surgery that can bring into view aspects that might not be otherwise apparent.

Composers Dr James Weeks reminded us that in music we have a tendency to priorities words that are associated with touch, such as texture, temperature, grain and introduced us to one of his works that evokes such tactility. Dr Aaron Einbond suggested a sense of disembodiment through reproduction, transcription, and trace in his compositional practice, and Dr Amber Priestley introduced us to one of her installations which we had the pleasure to experience hands on during a concert in the evening. Alongside wonderful performances by violist Benedict Taylor and guitarist Pétur Jónasson with live-coding by Dr Thor Magnusson. Pétur, in his talk earlier in the day asked whether a sonic instance could leave a permanent physical marker in our brain if it elicits a strong emotion, and Thor questioned whether the composed-work-concept is disappearing due to the expanding use of anthropic digital instruments.

Digital artist Amie Ray had us taste letters and kneed play-dough, choreographer Teoma Naccarato gave us insight into her collaborative practice in creating intimate, one-to-one dance performances, and ceramicist Julian Stair introduced us to his Quietus project that explores the containment of the human body after death.

Composer/sound artist Jan Hendrickse, understanding the body as a contested site which is caught in a constant performance, asked us to reimagine the body as musical structure. Dr Miguel Mera showed us how the synchronicity of sound and sight can elicit touch in film, and PhD candidate William Cole proposed touch as a model for an expanded musical form. Dr Adam Harper explored the tangibility of the digital by explaining that the digital does not lack physicality, but rather possesses a different kind of physicality. And landscape architect Johanna Gibbons introduced us to the connections between soil and roots with our lived experience.

In due course there will be a publication connected with this symposium, and we are very much looking forward to our next symposium in September 2018 called Socio-Sonic: an exploration of the social in sound.

City Music Head of Department Laudan Nooshin is delighted to report that a book that she has contributed to has been awarded a major academic book prize.

Jazz Worlds/World Jazz (Chicago University Press, 2016), edited by Philip V. Bohlman and Goffrredo Plastino, has received the American Musicological Society Ruth A. Solie Award, given each year to a collection of musicological essays of exceptional merit.

Laudan’s chapter is entitled ‘Jazz and its Social Meanings in Iran: From Cultural Colonialism to the Universal’, and explores various aspects of jazz and its social meanings in Iran from the 1950s onwards, focusing in particular on the period of cultural liberalism that followed the election of reformist President Khatami in 1997. Whilst most forms of western popular music were branded as a form of cultural imperialism and banned after the 1979 Iranian Revolution, jazz managed to remain largely unproblematic, mainly because it was positioned as a form of  “art” music and as a  “universal” musical expression. Laudan discusses the changing meanings of jazz in Iran over the past 70 years.

Jazz Worlds/World Jazz includes 16 chapters which explore a range of jazz traditions around the world, from Ethiopian jazz and Indian fusion, to Balkan swing and South African jazz.

http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/J/bo19637106.html

Autumn Reading Week found Alexander Lingas active on both sides of the Atlantic. He began by offering a public talk on ‘Russian Sacred Music between Byzantium and ‘the West’ at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, USA.  Sponsored by the Reed College departments of Russian and Music, it considered the shifting cultural location of Russian Orthodox sacred music as rulers, clergy, and lay members of the church steered it from its Byzantine origins into the modern era. Repeated attempts through the centuries to re-engage with Byzantine traditions were contrasted with other movements emphasizing engagement with Western art music or Slavic exceptionalism. The next day he offered a lecture on Russian liturgy and its music to an undergraduate module on the history of Russian literature.

The morning after returning to the UK Dr Lingas travelled to the University of Winchester, where he demonstrated Byzantine chant at a Study Day sponsored by the Tavener Centre for Music and Spirituality. The day ended with Evensong at Winchester Cathedral, which included traditional Byzantine chanting alongside choral works by the late Sir John Tavener.

 

 

 

On Wednesday 7th June 2017, the Music Department held its annual research afternoon with presentations by research students and staff.

The afternoon started with presentations by first year PhD students Gabrielle Messeder and Alice Jeffreys. Gabby talked about her research into the role of music in the ongoing Syrian conflict, with a paper  entitled: ‘YouTube battleground: Revolutionary and counter-revolutionary songs of the Syrian civil war’. This was followed by composition student Alice Jeffreys speaking about ‘YX (2017) for Ensemble XY: Discontinuity and Obscured Linearity’.

The next speaker was 4th year PhD student Sam MacKay, whose presentation was entitled: ‘Geopoetics of the French South: La Nòvia in Marseille’. This was followed by a staff presentation, with Claudia Molitor asking: ‘Where do all the earthworms go?’.

By this point in the afternoon, everyone was ready for tea and cake! After refreshments, we had another staff speaker, Adam Harper, talking about ‘Elysia Crampton: Geologies of Identity, Geologies of Sound’. The final final session featured presentations by 4th year PhD student, Emaeyak Sylvanus: ‘Finlandia and Biafra in Nollywood: Transnational aesthetic objectivity and the metaphoric journey of identity’ and 3rd year composition PhD student Elizabeth Black: ‘Texture Defined: an examination of Texture in instrumental music’.

We had a thoroughly stimulating afternoon. Many thanks to all the speakers and our very active and engaged audience!

City University Experimental Ensemble (CUEE) – an 18-piece student ensemble directed by Tullis Rennie –  recently performed a public concert of freely improvised music at central London venue IKLECTIK. The programme included works of graphic notation, animated scores and brand new pieces composed especially for the ensemble.

Composer and baritone saxophonist Cath Roberts featured as a guest artist , while MA composer Leon Lewington premiered his new work aMass.

Anna Vaughan and Jamie Turner – two final-year undergraduate members of the group – wrote about their experiences of playing at one of London’s most respected venues for improvised music.

Anna: “I am a a third year student who played the electric violin in CUEE. One of the best gigs in my uni experience was on April 5th when CUEE got to play at IKLECTIK right in the heart of London. We played pieces that had been written specifically for the ensemble which was such an incredible feeling. Having a London composer work with us gave it an immense professional presence. The outcome of the gig was an incredible feeling. A general public audience who came to enjoy young artists perform new experimental music gave it such an incredible atmosphere. Like I said before, one of the best gigs I’ve played at thanks to the effort that has been put into this ensemble.”

Jamie:  “I was ecstatic after CUEE’s IKLEKTIK gig, it’s the furtherest the ensemble has traveled from the university grounds and the experience was invaluable for us performers. The venue was well sourced for our brand of contemporary music, all members of the ensemble engaged passionately and professionally throughout the evening, and the public turn out helped to reassure us that there is still an audience for this style of music. Over the past year the transition from a student led independent group to a fully accredited ensemble has been seamless and I am confident that CUEE will continue to develop and expand its reach exponentially in the years to come.”

This years’ British Forum for Ethnomusicology Annual Conference was held at the University of Sheffield from 20th to 23rd April 2017. There were over 150 attendees from the UK, Europe and beyond, and the keynote speaker was Professor Michael Bakan from Florida State University. City’s Music Department was represented by two of its academic staff: Professor Stephen Cottrell and Dr Laudan Nooshin, who both delivered papers. Stephen’s paper was entitled ‘Ethnomusicology, Music Information Retrieval and Big Music Data’, and considered the ways in which computational analysis of large audio data sets might impact on the study and understanding of music traditions around the globe. Laudan presented as part of a roundtable which she convened on ‘The Ethics and Aesthetics of Studying Music in Situations of Conflict and Violence’. Her contribution focused on some of the issues raised by music video responses to the 2009 contested presidential elections in Iran. The roundtable generated interesting discussion across a range of issues related to undertaking research in situations of conflict and violence.

The size and success of the conference again demonstrated the strength and vitality of British ethnomusicology, and the large numbers of early career scholars who attended – including some from City – augurs well for the future development of this part of the music studies field.