*Apologies for cross-postings*

Advance notice

City University London
Music Department
Spring Term 2014 Research Seminar Series

College Building, Room AG09
St John's Street, London EC1V 4BP

We are pleased to announce our spring term research seminar series.

All welcome.


Thursday 30th January 2014, 5.30-7.30pm
Bernhard Lang (University of Graz): 'Loops and Grains: On the Usage of Granulators and Cellular Automata in the Monadologies I-XXVII'

Abstract: Starting with the presentation of experimental video processings and the concept of destructivism, the latest development of loop-aesthetics in my musical works 2007-2014 is to be explained and demonstrated.

Bernhard Lang is an Austrian composer in the experimental scene, writing scores and working with electronics to create a myriad of innovative performances.   He has maintained a steady output of performances and premieres with an eclectic variety of influences and is seen frequently collaborating with electronic musicians, DJs and video artists.  Recent commissions and premieres include Monadologie IX, III. Streichquartett for the Arditti String Quartet,  a 60-minute piece commissioned by Donaueschingen, Monadologie X 'alla turca' for player piano, an SWR commission, Monadologie XI '..for Anton' 2. Kammersinfonie for chamber orchestra from WDR.  Lang has had many commissions in international festivals including Darmstadter Ferienkurse, Donaueschingen, Moskow Modern Festival, Biennale Hannover, Salzburger Festspiele, Wien Modern.

http://www.city.ac.uk/events/2014/jan/loops-and-grains-on-the-usage-of-granulators-and-cellular-automata-in-the-monadologies-i-xxvii



Wednesday 5th February 2014,  5.30-7.30pm
John Richardson (University of Turku, Finland): 'An Eye For Music: The Audiovisual Surreal’

Abstract: In this presentation, I argue that the notion of the audiovisual surreal is helpful when unpacking a significant direction in recent audiovisual expression. My presentation summarizes and extends research undertaken in the book, An Eye For Music: Popular Music and the Audiovisual Surreal (Oxford University Press, 2011). In this research, I bring theories on historical surrealism into conversation with ideas about emerging audiovisual practices, including independent cinema, live performances of popular music, cinematic opera, and Internet practices such as syncing and audiovisual mash-ups. Surrealism in this context is understood not as diametrically opposed to realism, but as arising from perceptions of reality in a manner that encourages rather than effaces engagements with the experienced world. My discussion of the audiovisual neosurreal culminates in a four-part theorization that draws on the concepts of flows, interruptions, technologies and ghosts. In contrast to once-fashionable ideas about pastiche and the end of history, I pay special heed to the role of cultural and collective memories in shaping our understanding of creative practices in an age in which the recycling of artefacts is prevalent. The ghosts of previous eras, I argue, resonate in many of the expressive forms we routinely think of as contemporary.

John Richardson is Professor and Chair of Musicology at the University of Turku in Finland. He is the author of An Eye for Music: Popular Music and the Audiovisual Surreal (Oxford University Press 2011) and Singing Archaeology: Philip Glass’s Akhnaten (Wesleyan University Press 1999). He is co-editor of several books, including The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics (OUP 2013) and The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media (OUP 2013). Richardson is director of the Turku-based International Institute for Popular Culture. He has worked at several Finnish universities as well as City University London, the University of California at Los Angeles and De Montfort University, Leicester. His areas of expertise include popular music, musical multimedia, contemporary classical music and Finnish music.



Wednesday 12th February 2014,  5.30-7.30pm
Two speakers:
1) Miguel Mera (City University London): 'New Directions in the Study of Audiovisual Attention'
Abstract: This presentation will explore two possible new directions in the study of audiovisual attention. The first examines the ability of music to focus visual attention in narrative film, the second examines how visual editing and framing might impact on the way audiences hear concert music. Film music scholars, composers, directors and audiences have always implicitly believed that music can sometimes determine the focus of an audience’s visual attention, but researchers have not as yet been able to prove this empirically. I will report on an empirical eye-tracking study that examined the effects of music on visual attention, emotion and user experience during visual exploration tasks in a film sequence. The results show that music is able to direct how we see by switching attention to target foci more quickly but also that music can also encourage greater exploration of visual scenes outside targets.
As yet, there is scant research on the influence of the strategies used in the visual representation of musical performance. Using televised concert performances of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, I will consider the potential impact of visual ‘scene’ construction on musical attention, as well as some of the issues and challenges that this kind of research presents.
Miguel Mera is a composer of music for the moving image and a musicologist. He is interested in the combination of theory and practice within the context of contemporary culture and the creative industries. His film and television music has been screened and broadcast around the world. Miguel is published and represented by Music Sales. He is also widely published in screen music and sound studies. He is the author of Mychael Danna's The Ice Storm: a film score guide (Scarecrow Press, 2007) and co-editor ofEuropean Film Music (Ashgate, 2006). He is editor of a special edition of Music, Sound and the Moving Image entitled ‘Invention/Re-invention’ (2009) and co-editor of a special issue of Ethnomusicology Forum (2009) entitled ‘Screened Music: Global Perspectives’. He serves on the editorial boards of Music, Sound, and the Moving Image (University of Liverpool Press), Music and the Moving Image (University of Illinois Press), The Journal of Film Music (Equinox Press), and The Soundtrack (Intellect). His contribution to the public understanding of the subject includes appearances on the BBC Proms, Radio 3, and Radio 5 as well as numerous pre-concert talks and other events. Miguel is an output assessor for the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014, and is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Music at City University London.

2) Laudan Nooshin (City University London): 'Beyond the Radif: New Forms of Improvisational Practice in Iranian Music'

Abstract: For the past 100 years and more, the performance of Iranian classical music has been based on a repertoire known as radif, a collection of pieces organised according to mode and memorised by pupils for later use as the basis for creative performance. In the course of the 20th century, with the gradual institutionalisation of music education and the introduction of notation and sound recording, the radif became increasingly iconic of the tradition itself, and by the 1960s was closely linked with newly emerging discourses of ‘authenticity’ and ‘purity’. Today, the radif remains firmly at the heart of the Iranian classical tradition; to work outside the framework of the radif is to work outside the tradition.

However, in recent years a number of musicians have started to challenge the authority of the radif. Two such musicians are Amir Eslami (nei) and Hooshyar Khayam (piano), whose work I will discuss. Amir and Hooshyar belong to a new generation of composer-performers who are well-educated, cosmopolitan in outlook and highly articulate about their music. Their 2010 album All of You (Hermes Records, Iran) presents a new approach to improvisation which, whilst taking inspiration from the radif, lies outside the radif tradition and differs in important respects from ‘traditional’ forms of improvisation in Iranian music. In this seminar, I discuss the work of Amir and Hooshyar, presenting examples from their recent album, and ask what their music tells us about the possible future direction of creative practice in Iranian classical music.

Laudan Nooshin is Senior Lecturer in Ethnomusicology at City University London. Her research interests include creative processes in Iranian music; music and youth culture in Iran; music and gender; neo/post-colonialism and Orientalism; and music in Iranian cinema. Recent publications include the edited volume Music and the Play of Power in the Middle East, North Africa and Central Asia. Her forthcoming monograph is entitled Iranian Classical Music: The Discourses and Practice of Creativity.


Wednesday 5th March 2014,  5.30-7.30pm
Martin Stokes (King's College London): 'Issues of Love and Justice in Music'

Martin Stokes is King Edward Professor of Music at King's College London. He studied first music, then social anthropology at Oxford. He taught at The Queen's University of Belfast (1989-1997), the University of Chicago (1997-2007) and Oxford University (2007-2012). He was a Howard Foundation Fellow at the Chicago Humanities Institute in 2002-3. He has been a visiting professor at Bogazici University in Istanbul on two occasions, and currently holds an honorary professorship in the Department of Arts and Cultural Studies at the University of Copenhagen. In 2013 he will be giving the Bloch Lectures at the University of California, Berkeley.


Wednesday 12th March 2014,  5.30-7.30pm in the Performance Space, lower ground floor, College Building
John Rink (University of Cambridge): title tbc

John Rink is Professor of Musical Performance Studies and a Fellow of St John's College. He studied at Princeton University, King's College London, and the University of Cambridge, where his doctoral research was on the evolution of tonal structure in Chopin's early music and its relation to improvisation. He also holds the Concert Recital Diploma and Premier Prix in piano from the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. He specialises in the fields of performance studies, theory and analysis, and nineteenth-century studies, and has published six books with Cambridge University Press, including The Practice of Performance: Studies in Musical Interpretation (1995), Chopin: The Piano Concertos (1997), Musical Performance: A Guide to Understanding (2002), and Annotated Catalogue of Chopin's First Editions (with Christophe Grabowski; 2010). He is a co-editor of Chopin Studies 2 (with Jim Samson; 2004) and the Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music (with Nicholas Cook, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and Eric Clarke; 2009); he is also General Editor of the five-book series Studies in Musical Performance as Creative Practice, which Oxford University Press will publish in 2015.


http://www.city.ac.uk/arts-social-sciences/music
http://blogs.city.ac.uk/music/

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