Composition research formed a significant part of Surrey’s 2008 RAE submission, the work receiving either a 4* or 3* rating. It was also given special mention in the panel report. Since then, compositional research activity in the Department has increased considerably. In addition to the two full-time research-active composers in post for the 2008 submission (Dr Steve Goss and Dr Matthew Sansom), we now have two more research-active composers on the staff (Dr Thomas Armstrong and Dr Milton Mermikides). All four composers have received high-profile international commissions and are involved in collaborative projects. Their various outputs are bound together through theoretical reflection on and investigation of collaborative processes in composition.

This research group, which comprises all four departmental composers, has been set up to conduct practice-led research exploring the nature and practice of collaborative processes in music making, including work across the related areas of improvisation, performance practice and the role and function of intuition, dialogue and critical reflection. It is a cross-tradition initiative that recognises and incorporates the richness and complexities of how particular traditions (such as post-atonal, experimental, free and/or idiomatic improvisation, post-vernacular) relate to, describe and understand these issues. An additional and necessary element is the development of appropriate methodologies designed to explore and include practice, its processual qualities and forms of embodied knowledge, and which are sensitive to the intuitive and improvisatory dimensions of arts practice.

Research in popular musicology is led by Professor Allan Moore, whose work is long-established as world leading in the areas of rock and popular music theory, and is now expanding into repertories and practices which might loosely be termed as ‘folk’. He is series editor of Ashgate’s Library of Essays in Popular Music. Dr Tim Hughes is a junior researcher working in areas complementary to Professor Moore, principally African-American music such as soul and rock. Dr Jeremy Barham researches jazz and film music, and is founding editor of an Oxford University Press series of monographs on key jazz recordings.

In what might be called ‘concert music’, we have three senior researchers. Dr Barham has a strong reputation in Mahler studies. Dr Steve Downes has produced prolifically in areas of Central and Eastern European modernism and is editor of Routledge’s forthcoming Ideas in the Aesthetics of Music. Dr Chris Mark is well known for his work on twentieth-century British music, particularly that of Benjamin Britten. Together with Professor Moore, he founded the journal Twentieth Century Music.

www.surrey.ac.uk/msr/research/popularmusicandfilm

www.surrey.ac.uk/msr/research/modernist