Research Seminars
Fall Term, 2007
Tuesday 9 October at 4:00pm
TB6 (Teaching Block, Room 6)
| Dr. Steve Downes, Reader in Music, University of Surrey |  |
Musical Form and DecadenceThe aesthetics and topics of decadence are often identified with formal strategies evoking fragmentation, dissolution (Auflösung), negation, deformation, disintegration and ornamentation, in a pessimistic critique of the bourgeois illusion of subjective unity. As yet, however, the formal procedures of musical decadence have received relatively little analytical investigation or cultural contextualization. As Joseph Straus has recently highlighted, the mid-nineteenth-century rise of Formenlehre was contemporaneous with the invention of a modern language for the discussion and definition of norm and abnorm, of physical disability and psychological deviance. The reified musical formal 'norms' were characteristically described in terms of containment, balance, development and proportion. Decadence, with its delight in degeneration, decay, derangement, excess, atrophy and abandon, offered a potent challenge to these formal traditions. Decadence similarly subverted the emphasis on dynamic, evolutionary and vital energetics in the discourses of the post-Darwinian modern age, in which artistic form was constructed as a parallel or expressive metaphor for life's struggles to higher, stronger forms. |
Decadent strategies were also part of the compositional response of the modern generation born in the second half of the nineteenth century to the 'recently reified or crystallized' Wagnerian musical idiom, a response which, as James Hepokoski has notably demonstrated, involved the exploration of 'deformations' of traditional formal structures and narrative processes.
This paper will illustrate decadent formal strategies through analysis and hermeneutic interpretation of examples from the music of Richard Strauss (Salome) and Alban Berg (the Piano Sonata Op.1).
Dr. Steve Downes is Reader in Musicology at the University of Surrey. He studied at the University of Exeter and Goldsmiths' College, University of London. Specialisms include aspects of theory and analysis (especially with regard to late 19th and early 20th-century music), aesthetics, and the erotic in music since 1800. He has published widely on the music of Karol Szymanowski, and also on Schumann, Bartók and Penderecki. In 1989 he won the Wilk Prize for Research in Polish Music from the University of Southern California and in 1999 was awarded the Karol Szymanowski Memorial Medal.
Admission Free
Tuesday 6 November at 4:00pm
TB6 (Teaching Block, Room 6)
Will Todd
Fusions and Stories
Composer Will Todd talks about his writing and his cross-genre approach to telling stories and creating a sense of the dramtic.
Will Todd has written numerous commissions and his output includes oratorio, opera, liturgical music, music theatre, orchestral and concerto works. He has worked with The Halle, The Sixteen, Emma Johnson, Streetwise Opera, Opera Genesis, The BBC Singers, The Brunel Ensemble, Welsh National Opera and English National Opera and had works performed all over the UK and in the US. Notable works include Mass in Blue (jazz oratorio), The Screams of Kitty Genovese (music theatre), The Blackened Man (opera), The Burning Road (oratorio) and Whirlwind (opera – directed by Keith Warner).
Admission Free
Tuesday 20 November at 4:00pm
TB6 (Teaching Block, Room 6)
| Dr. Patricia Schmidt, Lecturer in Music, University of Surrey |  |
'It Just Melts My Heart When I Sing That Song':
|
This seminar explores the role of music in the representation of "The Quilts of Gee's Bend", a particularly successful textile exhibit which toured the USA from 2002-2006. It positions the music included in the exhibit as central to the curatorial project of elevating the quilts to high-art status and to their subsequent reception as such. Additionally, it engages questions of ethnographic process within communities where others are already engaged in efforts to preserve and document cultural products as commercially viable objects.
Admission Free
Tuesday 4 December at 4:00pm
Lecture Theatre M
| Dr. Tim Hughes, Lecturer in Music, University of Surrey |  |
‘The Beautiful Ones Always Smash the Picture... Always, Every Time’:
|
Dr Tim Hughes came to Surrey as a Lecturer in Music in 2005. A former rock musician in local scenes in Nashville, Tennessee and Austin, Texas, Tim completed his PhD on the music of Stevie Wonder in 2003. He has taught music in Seattle at the University of Washington and in his hometown of San Antonio at the University of the Incarnate Word, Saint Mary's University, and San Antonio College. In Seattle he was also the Multimedia Editor for The Jimi Hendrix Gallery, The History of Recorded Sound, and The Next Rock Record at Experience Music Project, where his electronic exhibits received numerous industry awards and media coverage.
Tim is the former chair of the Society for Music Theory's Popular Music Group and co-founded an annual popular music conference series, held each spring at Experience Music Project. He has made numerous conference presentations on R&B, soul, funk, punk, hip-hop, and blues rock, the music of Stevie Wonder, the use of repetition and grooves, and the analysis of popular music. His most recent publications are a chapter on a live performance by Nirvana, written for Performance And Popular Music: History, Place And Time , edited by Ian Ingliss (Ashgate 2006), and a chapter on Stevie Wonder's "Living for the City", written for a new, expanded edition of Walter Everett's Expression in Pop-Rock Music (Routledge: later in 2007). He is also currently serving as a member of the managing committee for PRIMO ( Practice-as-Research in Music Online ) for the University of London's Institute for Music Research.
Admission Free
Spring Term, 2008
Tuesday 5 February at 4:00pm
Lecture Theatre M
| Dr. Chris Malloy, Assistant Professor, University of Denver |  |
Rhythmic and Textural Features of Cadences in Mario Davidovsky's Divertimento for Cello and OrchestraDr. Chris Malloy will discuss the music of Argentinian composer Mario Davidovsky. Davidovsky first came to prominence in the early 1960s as a composer of electronic music and an assistant to Edgard Varèse. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Synchronisms No. 6 in 1971. George Crumb wrote of Davidovsky that he was "the most elegant of all the electronic composers whose music I know." Since the mid-1970s, however, the vast majority of Davidovsky's works have been written for traditional instruments, including the 1984 Divertimento for Cello and Orchestra. |
Dr Chris Malloy is a composer from Denver, Colorado. He is Assistant Professor of music and Chair of the Department of Composition and Theory at the University of Denver's Lamont School of Music. His music has been presented in Brazil, Canada, Germany, Ireland, the UK, and the US, by Elizabeth Keusch, Jonathan Leathwood, the Auros Group for New Music, the East Coast Composers Ensemble, Crosscurrents, the Guildford International Festival of Contemporary Music, the Boston Cyberarts Festival, the Sonorities International Festival of Contemporary Music, the Warebrook Contemporary Music Festival, the Master Singers, the Boston Cecilia Chorus, the Pennsylvania Wind Quintet, the Lydian and Alard String Quartets, the Cambridge Symphony Orchestra, the Music on the Hill Orchestra, members of the Colorado Symphony Orchestra, and others. Dr. Malloy has also taught at Brandeis University and the New England Conservatory of Music. He is currently resident at the University of Surrey for the Spring Semester of 2008.
Admission Free
Tuesday 26 February at 4:00pm
Lecture Theatre M
| Mark Percival, Lecturer in Media and Culture, Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh |  |
Place, Independence and Identity:
|
This seminar draws on participant observation and interviews conducted by the author in the mid-late 1990s with central figures in the productivity centred around Chemikal Underground, and new material gathered in 2007 from the same sources. It explores two key strands of musical identity - ideologies of independence and notions of place - and seeks to explain how the passing of more than a decade has changed the ways in which musicians and record label understand what they do and why they do it. Participants are the former members of The Delgados and members of early Chemikal signings Mogwai and Bis.
Mark Percival has been lecturing in media and culture for 13 years and is particularly interested in radio and the recording industry, having completed a PhD with Simon Frith exploring the social dynamics of the relationship between record industry pluggers and music radio programmers. Forthcoming in print (2008) a chapter on Mediation of Popular Music (the press, radio and television) in a collection to be published in France by The University Press of Rennes. He is on the organising committee for the IASPM-UK (International Association for the Study of Popular Music) conference at Glasgow University in September this year. Mark was also a Mercury Music Prize judging committee member in 1999 (Gomez, on whom he was out-voted) and 2000 (Talvin Singh, whom he liked very much).
Alongside his academic career he DJ'd for BBC Radio Scotland 1989-2000 (indie, alternative and electronica), had a brief mid-90s stint at London's XFM and ran the long running Club Mouth night at Glasgow's legendary (original) 13th Note. He also played guitar and bass in various impressively unsuccessful (and unsigned) bands until tinnitus got the better of his desire to stand in front of a vintage Marshall half-stack. The somewhat less rock and roll world of 12w practice amps (vintage, of course) and GarageBand is where he spends available hours now, with some similarly minded and equally creaking musicians.
Biggest inflences? Frith, Peel, Ramones and Kraftwerk.
Admission Free
Tuesday 11 March at 4:00pm
Lecture Theatre M
Dr. J. P. E. Harper-Scott, Lecturer in Music, |
 |
Made You Look!
|
Thomas Mann attended the premiere of Salome in 1906 and, partly in response to it (and to his be-lief that Wagnerism was no longer the most viable artistic modernism) wrote Der Tod in Venedig in 1911–12. Britten’s opera intensifies Mann’s neoclassicism in its treatment of the Greek aesthetic ar-guments that it maps onto Aschenbach’s obsession with Tadzio, and modern criticism has tended to follow Britten’s emphasis. By relocating Britten’s opera in the aesthetic tradition that is its obverse, and by analyzing its handling of musical structure, this paper seeks to direct attention once more onto its engagement with cultural constructions of the child in modernity, and onto the ethical complexity of operatic composition in the twentieth century.
J. P. E. Harper-Scott came to Royal Holloway in 2005, having taught previously at the Universities of Oxford, Nottingham, and Liverpool. He has scholarly interests in Elgar, Walton, Britten, Vaughan Williams, Schenkerian theory, the philosophy of Heidegger, and meaning in music. He is the author of Edward Elgar, Modernist (2006) and Elgar: An Extraordinary Life (2007), and is the co-editor with Julian Rushton of Elgar Studies (2007) and with Jim Samson of An Introduction to Music Studies, a textbook for new undergraduates written by RHUL staff. Dr Harper-Scott has contributed articles to 19th-Century Music, Music Analysis, and Music & Letters, and a chapter to The Cambridge Companion to Elgar, ed. Daniel M. Grimley and Julian Rushton (2004). Articles and book chapters in press consider Walton’s symphonic response to Sibelianism, the ‘nationalization’ of modernism in England, and interpersonal existential issues in Britten’s Peter Grimes. He is preparing a second monograph on Britten’s operas. Among his other public engagements are keynote speeches and illustrated talks for the Philharmonia Orchestra as part of their nationwide Elgar celebrations in 2007, and for the London Symphony Orchestra’s ‘Discovery Day’ on Elgar. With Daniel M. Grimley he is convening a conference, ‘Elgar and Musical Modernism’ in association with the Institute of Musical Research and Gresham College.
Admission Free
Tuesday 15 April at 4:00pm
Lecture Theatre M
| Dr. Andrew Flory, Assistant Professor of Music History, Shenandoah University Conservatory of Music |  |
Marvin Gaye, Politics, and Power at MotownThis presentation chronicles how Marvin Gaye navigated the political hierarchy at Motown Records during the 1960s, gained control over his creative process, and used recording technology to compose music. Beginning in 1968, Gaye covertly started working as a producer and experimented by composing the melodic and lyrical portions of his songs directly to tape over an already-completed background track. Once he was officially at the helm, Gaye freely employed this method, which I call "vocal composition," to integrate the acts of recording and composition. Vocal composition was used to create much of Gaye's most popular and enduring music of the 1970s (the albums What's Going On and Let's Get it On), in addition to a body of less popular, but nonetheless astounding, work (Here, My Dear and the Bobby Scott sessions). I will expose this working method in my presentation using a large body of rare audio examples and graphic transcriptions, which range from Gaye's first efforts at production in 1968 to his last album for Motown in 1979, In Our Lifetime. |
Andrew Flory studied music at City College of New York and taught elementary music in New York's Washington Heights neighborhood before beginning postgraduate study at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. While there he taught highly attended classes on the History of Rock Music, The Golden Age of Rhythm and Blues, The Music of the American Folk Revival, and the Music of Motown. His doctoral dissertation, entitled "I Hear a Symphony: Making Music at Motown, 1959-1979," was awarded the Glen Haydon Award for Outstanding Dissertation in Musicology from the UNC Music Department. Andrew has presented papers to the American Musicological Society, the Society for Music Theory, and the IASPM-US. He has also given pre-concert talks for the North Carolina Symphony and been invited to speak before the Popular Music Interest Group of the Society for Music Theory, the North Carolina meeting of Tanglewood II, the South Central Graduate Music Consortium, and the Cleveland Youth Orchestra and Progressive Arts Alliance. Andrew has articles and encyclopedia entries in press on the music of Marvin Gaye, the Beatles, and African American pop singers and balladeers. His book I Hear a Symphony: Listening to the Music of Motown is forthcoming from The University of Michigan Press.
Admission Free
Tuesday 15 April at 6:15pm
PATS Studio One
| Dr. Eric Flesher, Assistant Professor, Central Washington University |  |
Please join us for a special talk with Seattle-area composer Eric Flesher, who will discuss his approach to music composition. Born in Princeton, New Jersey (USA) in 1968, Eric Flesher began musical studies on the piano at the age at the age of four, later taking up the saxophone and guitar. He has studied composition with Joël-François Durand, Paul-Heinz Dittrich, Aurelio de la Vega, and Daniel Kessner, and holds degrees from California State University, Northridge (B.M., 1993), Cambridge University (M. Phil, 1995), the Hochschule für Music “Hanns Eisler”, Berlin (Künstlerisch-weiterbildendes Studium, 2001), and the University of Washington (D.M.A., 2002). His works have been performed in the United States, Europe, and Asia, and have received numerous awards and distinctions. In 2002, he received the Franz Liszt Stipendium für junge Komponisten, which entitled him to a four-month residency as guest of the Hochschule für Musik “Franz Liszt” in Weimar, Germany. Since 2003, he has been Lecturer in Music at Central Washington University in Ellensburg, Washington, where he currently directs the composition area. |
Admission Free