General
The Sir John Manduell Research Forum Series, Forman Lecture Theatre
Conservatoire: a place for musicians who think about what they do …
Almost every week in term-time, you can take a break from your rehearsals, practice, teaching, administration, research activities or whatever else you are up to, and come along for some refreshing mental stimulation, hopefully in an area of musical activity that you may not yet be that familiar with. The Research Forum programme brings a mixture of members of RNCM staff and guest speakers from around the world to make a presentation on some aspect of their work – whether it’s musicological, creative, educational, music-psychological or other kinds of research (by which we mean 'all kinds of thought and reflection that musicians do about what they do as musicians'). The talk lasts about 45 minutes and then the floor is open for questions, discussion, and, if you’re lucky, the odd bit of (strictly intellectual) fisticuffs. Discussions continue afterwards in the bar and usually the hard core move onto supper nearby. See below for this term’s programme and, especially, the sheer diversity of topics that will be covered and the range of presenters: all that is needed to make it work is YOU! Looking forward to seeing you as often as you can make it.
Wednesday 16 October 2019 4:15pm
Forman Lecture Theatre
Professor Roy Howat, RAM, RCS
Editing Chopin’s Etudes (yet again)
Chopin’s music has appeared in so many editions over a century and a half, including critical editions, that we may well ask what’s the point of yet another. One answer comes from the original sources, which have surprised me in several places with good manuscript readings never printed – sometimes because a bold gesture has always been misconstrued, sometimes because of a lurking technical or notational issue. I’ll illustrate some of these and explore what probably happened. The other answer lies in how editions are generally prepared. Chopin, creatively restless, could never play, write out or even proof a piece twice the same way; since his lifetime editors have habitually dealt with this by assembling a text from the ‘best-seeming’ readings in different sources. The New Peters Complete Chopin, launched in the early 2000s by Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger, John Rink & Jim Samson, instead bases each piece on a single source deemed best for the purpose, maintaining the integrity of a single version while showing all viable variants as ossias; this provides pianists for the first time with an effective navigation system across variant readings and versions.
Wednesday 23 October 2019 4:15pm
Forman Lecture Theatre
Dr Scott McLaughlin, University of Leeds
On Material Indeterminacy: letting the instrument be in control
While the dominant paradigm of performance is (understandably) that of specific control of the instrument, this talk will open up the compositional space of ‘material indeterminacy’ where the performer instead supports the preferences of the instrument to do what it ‘wants’: with reference to Pickering’s concept of ‘material agency’ (1995) and Ingold’s ‘wayfaring’ (2011). By letting the materiality of the instrument come to the foreground, the performer’s skill-set is resituated as sound-instigator and supporter. The performer’s job is to coax the instrument into less-stable configurations and support the resulting sounds.
Wednesday 30 October 2019 4:15pm
Forman Lecture Theatre
Professor Andrea Halpern, Bucknell University, USA
How Well Do We Know How Well We Are Imagining Sounds?
Mental imagery abilities vary among individuals, as shown both by objective measures and by self-report. Few imagery studies consider auditory imagery, however. In this talk, I will argue that a. there are individual differences in auditory imagery for music b. these can be captured via self-report and c. this self-report predicts some interesting behavioural and neural aspects of imagining music. The Bucknell Auditory Imagery Scale is a short self-report measure encompassing both Vividness and Control of auditory imagery. High scores on Vividness predict outcomes as varied as source memory errors in distinguishing heard from imagined tunes pitch imitation tasks as well as neural activity and grey matter volume in several brain areas that are known to be involved in auditory imagery. Another way auditory imagery may vary is from trial to trial and I offer some examples of the predictive value of self-reports of that more ‘state’ aspect of auditory imagery. Even though self-report measures encompass both cognitive and metacognitive aspects, they are useful tools in accounting for individual differences in high-level cognitive skills.
Wednesday 20 November 2019 4:15pm
Forman Lecture Theatre
Dr Cheryll Duncan RNCM
Musical life in an eighteenth-century prison: the genesis of Granom's Plain and easy instructions for playing on the German flute (1766)
Lewis Granom’s Plain and easy instructions for playing on the German flute is significant in being the earliest work on the pedagogy of the instrument by a named English author. Documents recently discovered among the legal records held by The National Archives reveal that the treatise had an extraordinary genesis, being largely the product of the many lessons Granom gave to its dedicatee, John Bourke Esq., a wealthy Irish landowner who was incarcerated for debt in the King’s Bench Prison at the time. The litigation that followed the breakdown of their friendship sheds fascinating light on a range of matters, including the patron/composer relationship, their musical tastes and views regarding Handel’s posthumous reputation, the sources used to compile the Instructions, the cultural and social life of one of London’s more salubrious gaols, and the cost of music lessons, copying and other related expenses.
Wednesday 27 November 2019 4:15pm
Forman Lecture Theatre
Dr Geoff Thomason RNCM
“Far harder than orchestral stuff”, or Nicholson lost and found: rediscovering a major chamber work from wartime Manchester
Sydney Nicholson is remembered largely as the founder of the Royal School of Church Music, but is less known as a composer. In 2018 as part of our WW1 commemoration, I revived the Piano Quintet written while Nicholson was organist of Manchester cathedral and premiered with the Brodsky Quartet in 1918. This presentation charts the latter day journey from unpublished MS to performance, drawing on contemporary documentation and including performed extracts from the Quintet.
Wednesday 4 December 2019 4:15pm
Forman Lecture Theatre
Dr Tom Armstrong University of Surrey
(Re-)visits to the past: three musical ruinations.
This paper discusses three recent pieces of mine in which well-known works of Western art music have been selectively erased to bring forth new material. This approach may be likened to a form of printing or etching, with the original music acting as the base material which is then carved into, creating a new design. The discussion will be framed by the conjoined notions of musical ruination and ‘playing with history’ (Butt 2002), offering an articulation of my attitude towards the musical past alongside technical discussion of compositional processes in these pieces.”A performance of Tänze (2018) for two or more keyboards will offer a first-hand experience of this practice.
Wednesday 11 December 2019 4:15pm
Forman Lecture Theatre
Professor Deborah Mawer Royal Birmingham Conservatoire
Les Six at 100: Neoclassicism, lateness and legacy: Milhaud’s case
On the centenary of Les Six, this seminar paper tackles some commonly perceived problems: neoclassicism as retrogressive, behind the times, anti-modernist and so lacking legacy. Focusing on Milhaud’s case, particularly his post-World War II American activities, I look to challenge these assumptions. Rather than playing safe, some of Milhaud’s late œuvre resumes a radically experimental, youthful voice – a different kind of ‘out of time’. While this neoclassicism still thrives on counterpoint, the linearity also leads to an aleatoric ‘phasing’ that reveals Milhaud as a potential catalyst for his one-time postmodernist pupil Steve Reich. Moreover, Milhaud’s jazz exploration (most famously in La Création du monde) serves to catalyse the forays of his student Dave Brubeck into a new classicism. Moving out from Milhaud, the legacy of neoclassicism gains a new cross-genre currency in the work of Wynton Marsalis and others, following Miles Davis’s ‘controlled freedom’, in what is called ‘neoclassical jazz’.
Wednesday 8 January 2020 4:15pm
Forman Lecture Theatre
Dr Nicola Pennill, University of Sheffield
Musicians in transition: Emergence of interactions and communication in musical ensembles
In organisation research, music ensembles are often regarded as models of group coordination. Like other work groups, musical ensembles face time pressures and complex demands, and as well as musical skills and knowledge, the group dynamics involved are a key part of shaping a performance. Individual contributions form part of an interacting, dynamic system in which the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. Rehearsal discussions in newly formed vocal ensembles revealed ‘hidden’ patterns of communication. Combined with player reflections, this research suggests that communication patterns were structured as a series of phases, which emerged over time as performance approached.
Wednesday 15 January 2020 4:15pm
Forman Lecture Theatre
Dr Zack Moir, Edinburgh Napier University
We are NOT Neutral: A Freirean Critique of (Popular) Music in Higher Education
2018 saw the 50th anniversary of the publication of Paulo Freire’s book Pedagogy of the Oppressed, which has become an important text that has influenced many progressive educators, internationally. The concepts and ideas set forth in this work have been critiqued, analysed and developed in numerous scholarly contexts over the last half century, and this includes some analysis and application within the field of music education. However, within the relatively new area of popular music education (PME) few scholars have dealt with or explicitly drawn on this work to influence their analysis of our growing field.
This presentation will draw on a number of key concepts from this classic text and use them to critique some of the normative practices, standard approaches, and unquestioned values that are prevalent in music education in HE. Use of Freire’s concepts as a framework helps to link this discussion to a wider critical analysis of the place of higher education in society, problems with the neo-liberalisation of HE institutions, and the awkward position that music (and particularly popular music) finds itself in as an area of study within this system.
Wednesday 22 January 2020 4:15pm
Forman Lecture Theatre
Professor Michael Symmons Roberts, Manchester Metropolitan University; Professor Emily Howard, Rachel Johnson, RNCM
The Anvil: an Elegy for Peterloo
Composer Emily Howard (Professor of Composition, RNCM) and poet/librettist Michael Symmons Roberts (Professor of Poetry, Man Met) in conversation with musicologist Rachel Johnson (Historian, The Anvil MIF 2019) about their recent Manchester International Festival collaboration The Anvil: an Elegy for Peterloo, a large-scale work for soloists, choirs and orchestra commemorating the 200th Anniversary of Peterloo.
Wednesday 29 January 2020 4:15pm
Forman Lecture Theatre
RNCM Holocaust Memorial Lecture
Monica Bohm-Duchen, Dr Norbert Meyn Royal College of Music
Belonging and not Belonging
Dr Norbert Meyn (Royal College of Music) is the Principal Investigator of the new AHRC-funded research project Music, Migration and Mobility which explores the legacy of migrant musicians from Nazi Europe in Britain through practical music making, archival research and mapping. Norbert will perform a couple of songs by émigré composers Peter Gellhorn (1912-2004) and Karl Rankl (1898-1968) and discuss the challenges in contextualising, researching and marketing this repertoire today. He will also give an outline of the repertoire written by these émigrés in Britain and share his experience from performing this at the RCM and with his professional group, Ensemble Émigré. https://www.rcm.ac.uk/research/projects/musicmigrationandmobility/
Monica Bohm-Duchen is a London-based art historian and the initiator and Creative Director of the year-long, nationwide Insiders/Outsiders Festival (https://insidersoutsidersfestival.org/), which celebrates the contribution made to British culture by refugees from Nazi-dominated Europe in a wide range of different media. Monica will explain her motives for undertaking this ambitious project and – since the festival officially ends in March 2020 – consider the ways in which it has been received and the longer-term impact she hopes it will have on keeping the all-important concept of cultural cross-fertilisation firmly in the public eye.
Wednesday 5 February 2020 4:15pm
Forman Lecture Theatre
Dr Ian Pace, City, University of London
What Does It Mean to be a Self-Reflexive Practitioner?
The issue of self-reflexivity in musical practice is, I argue, fundamental to the concepts of practice-as-research, autoethnography, experimentation in musical practice, as well as a range of ideologies and practices existing within tertiary education institutions with music departments. In this presentation I derive a meaning for self-reflexivity through interrogation of the other concepts, while drawing upon a range of experience and observation of others. I argue in conclusion that critically self-reflexive practice entails fundamentally an attitude rather than any one particular type of methodology, and give specific examples of its manifestation in my own work as performer, musicologist and composer.
Wednesday 26 February 2020 4:15pm
Forman Lecture Theatre
Dr Sue Miller, Leeds Beckett University
Performance and Practice Research: Three Acts of Translation
Taking Simon McKerrell’s paper ‘Towards Practice Research in Ethnomusicology’ as a starting point I present here three examples of my own practice research which use performance as ‘a central methodology,’ as a ‘translation of artistic performance aesthetics’ and as a ‘research outcome sited in original performance.’ (McKerrell, 2019, 1) In the three examples presented here (monographs on Latin music performance aesthetics and improvisational creativity, a British Academy-funded performance and production project, and a music, dance and animation collaboration), I will demonstrate how I have employed my own performance practice to produce text, performances, scores, audio recordings, and audio-visual research outputs which translate research insights for both outside and inside the artistic community of practice.
Wednesday 4 March 2020 4:15pm
Carole Nash Recital Room
RNCM Michael Kennedy International Research Lecture
Professor Rachel Beckles Willson, SOAS
Creative migrations with the oud: technology, memory and musical storytelling
In this lecture-recital Rachel Beckles Willson presents her work as a scholar and composer, addressing how old and new musical technologies can be part of creative engagements with musical migration. The programme will include performances of historical and repertoire and also new works, including her multi-media work-in-progress "Listening to a boat of memories".
Wednesday 4 March 2020 7.30pm
Carole Nash Recital Room
RNCM Composers’ Concert
Following on from the afternoon’s International Research Lecture, the first part of tonight’s concert features new works for oud, voice, string quartet and marimba.
Wednesday 11 March 2020 4:15pm
Forman Lecture Theatre
Dr Anthony Gritten, Royal Academy of Music
“There is no need for a great deal of activity”: Cage’s musical politics in the 1970s
In the mid-1970s Cage created three works utilising plants, sea shells, water, and fire: Child of Tree, Branches, Inlets. Cage’s triptych resonated with the Vietnam War, the US bicentenary, and rising ecological concern following the oil crisis. This presentation analyses how these works projected new links between performance, nature, and politics, through the mode of improvisation they required and the performativity that emerged from their discursive apparatuses.
Wednesday 18 March 2020 4:15pm
Forman Lecture Theatre
Professor Katharine Ellis, University of Cambridge
Taking the French Provinces Seriously
When Charles de Gaulle asked in 1962 how one could possibly govern a country that made 246 varieties of cheese, he referenced a centuries-long tradition of national leaders confronting the wilful diversity of the terrain they called France. Musicologists working on the modern era have been less wilful: we have tacitly accepted the most common political solution to the problem of French diversity—centralisation—and we have let it condition our research questions and practices, our fields of vision, and our conclusions. Parisian avant-garde cultures have provided the grand narrative for the rest of the country while closing off other ways of thinking. This presentation asks how we can challenge that perspective, and what happens when we do.
Wednesday 25 March 2020 4:15pm
Forman Lecture Theatre
Professor Doug Jarman, RNCM
Alban Berg: Editorial and analytical considerations
Douglas Jarman, author of The Music of Alan Berg, editor of the critical editions of the two Concertos for the Alban Berg Gesamtausgabe and joint author of the forthcoming critical commentary, will discuss some of the editorial considerations raised by the Violin Concerto and new analytical considerations raised by the preparation of a volume of Collected Essays.